Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress.

edited by Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian Patterson and Mark Reinhardt The MIT Press, April 2003, $45.00, ISBN 0-262-02540-X

Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress accompanies an exhibition organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Pennsylvania, and the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The 208-page book includes an overview of Walker's work, and comprises cut-paper silhouette installations, drawings and several of her writings. Essayists in the book include Darby English, Mark Reinhardt, Ann Wagner and Michele Wallace. Each essayist contemplates the representations of race, sex, slavery and history in exploring Walker's work and the public reaction to it.

The "Negress" is nearly always the focus of Kara Walker's work. A compelling icon, it is the primary image through which Walker expresses her own artistic vision, albeit transgressive and outrageous at times. Working in a tradition--the silhouette--that was popular in the South in the 19th century, Walker manages to artfully manipulate and subvert the stereotypes of slavery that the medium was historically used to purvey. Her work is to the original cutout silhouette what Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone is to Gone With the Wind--and then some. Walker's silhouettes depict blacks in demeaning and often sexually compromising positions, as well as scenarios where they appear to be exploited by whites.

In The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995), three shadowy images of black slave women appear to be simultaneously sucking each other's breast while an infant sits on the knee of one, his lips just out of reach. In another series, The Means to an End ... A Shadow Drama in Five Acts (1995), one of the series' sequences depicts a naked, black girl whose neck is being wrung by her white master as his leg is positioned between her knees. But while other black artists have employed stereotypes in debunking racist imagery--Robert Colescott and Michael Ray Charles, to name two--what has some critics up in arms is that Walker's work pushes the tropes of slavery to the extreme. It is the unmitigated images of "negative" stereotypes--blackface if you will--that has led some to label her work as offensive. In particular, African-American conceptual artist Betye Saar, who called for a boycott of Kara Walker's work shortly after Walker, who was not yet 30 at the time, received a MacArthur "genius" award in 1997.

Narratives of a Negress responds to Walker's detractors. In an essay by black cultural critic Michele Wallace, she observes: "The aptitude for risking something dangerous and rare in one's creative output as an artist ranks higher than talent, a graceful line, an acute sense of color and composition, a poetic soul, or a gift for cocktail party gab," she writes. "Luckily for us ... there are such contrarians and oppositionalists among us who will always refuse to follow the crowd--black artists and intellectuals willing to brave the generic disapproval...."

Indeed, Kara Walker is, if anything, an artistic oppositionalist.

--Evette Porter is BIBR's executive editor.