Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. She has gained national and international recognition for her cut-paper silhouettes depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation. Walker has also used drawing, painting, text, shadow puppetry, film, and sculpture to expose the ongoing psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Her work leads viewers to a critical understanding of the past while also proposing an examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes.
Education, Cut-Paper Silhouettes, Endless Conundrum, an African American Anonymous Adventuress
A native of Stockton, California, Walker earned a B.F.A. at the Atlanta College of Art and an M.F.A at the Rhode Island School of Design. She made her New York debut in a 1994 group exhibition at the Drawing Center with the 25-foot-long wall installation Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994). Its caricatured antebellum figures, which are engaged in violent and sexual interactions, were silhouettes cut from black paper and installed directly on the wall. The silhouette technique has its roots in the sentimental Victorian “ladies’ art” of shadow portraits, but the scale of Walker’s work also alluded to the 360-degree historical cycloramas popular during the post-Civil War era for the depiction of battle scenes.
Walker has continued to use both the silhouette and cyclorama forms to explore the nature of race representation as well as the history of figuration and narrative in contemporary art. In Endless Conundrum, an African American Anonymous Adventuress (2001), she interrogates the representation of the black body by Modernist artists from Matisse to Brancusi.
