Artists speak: Kara Walker.

Kara Walker makes prints, drawings, and installations that evoke the antebellum South and aspects of its history, including power dynamics, and race relations. Her installations most often consist of black, cut-out silhouettes of characters frozen in the midst of dramatic moments.

"One thing that got me interested in working with silhouettes, but then working on the large scale, had to do with two sorts of longings. One was to make history painting in the grand tradition. I love history paintings. I didn't realize I loved them for a long time. I thought that they were ridiculous in their pompous gestures. But the more I started to examine my own relationship with history, my own attempts to position myself in my historical moment, the more love I had for this artistic, painterly conceit, which is to make a painting a stage, and to think of your characters, your portraits, as characters on that stage. And to give them this moment, to freeze-frame a moment that is full of pain and blood and guts and drama and glory."

"Beauty is just kind of an accident. Beauty is just a happenstance. Beauty is the remainder of being a painter. The work becomes pretty because I wouldn't be able to look at a work about something as grotesque as what I'm thinking about, and as grotesque as projecting one's ugly soul onto another's pretty body, and representing that in an ugly way. I have always been attracted to the lure, work that draws a viewer in through a kind of seductive offering: 'Here's something to look at. Stay a while.'"

"It's a continuation of a series of work that I've been doing with large, narrative silhouette scenes, building around this idea of the cyclorama or a kind of historical exhibit. In this case, it's somewhat hysterical. The idea at the outset was an image of a slave revolt at some point prior to me. And it was a slave revolt in the antebellum South where the house slaves got after their master with their instruments, their utensils of every day life .... My reference in my mind was the surgical theater paintings of Thomas Eakins and others. "

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About the Artist

Born: 1969, Stockton, CA

Lives and Works: New York, NY

Media and Materials: paper, chalk, watercolor, light projection, printmaking and drawing

Influences: 18th-and 19th-century silhouette art, race relations, historical archetypes, antebellum South, Thomas Eakins, slave narratives, historical cyclorama paintings, Harlequin Romances, Gone with the Wind, Civil War era, minstrelsy Kara Walker is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery, creating a theatrical space in which her unruly cut-paper characters interact and often provoke one another. In recent works like Insurrection!, the artist uses overhead projectors to throw colored light onto the ceiling, walls, and floor of the exhibition space. When the viewer walks into the installation, his or her body casts a shadow onto the walls where it mingles with Walker's black-paper figures and landscapes. With one foot in the historical realism of slavery and the other in the fantastical space of the romance novel, Walker's provocative fictions simultaneously seduce and implicate the audience.

Kara Walker, Philadelphia, 1996. Watercolor. gouache on paper, 80 1/2 x 51 1/2" (203 x 130 cm). Private Collection, Courtesy Brent Sikkema, New York.

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Kara Walker, Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On), 2002, Installation view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Projection, cut paper, and adhesive on wall, 12 x 74 1/2 (3.65 x 22.7 m). Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Courtesy Brent Sikkema, New York.

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