Artwork: Kara Walker, An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters: No World, , edition 19/30, 2010, Etching with aquatint, sugar-lift, spit-bite and dry-point 27 X 39 in., Photo: Courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
“Once you open up the Pandora’s box of race and gender… you’re never done,” African American artist Kara Walker observed. It’s a trove of archetypes that intersect into a web that spins infinite possibilities for the artist to engage and represent, question and dismantle, subvert and repossess.
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Born in Stockton, CA, in 1969, Walker moved to her father’s native Georgia, at the age of 13. She grew up in the Stone Mountain area, experiencing full on culture shock in a world that waxed rhapsodic for the Confederacy, openly holding Ku Klux Klan rallies. In the face of racism, Walker discovered she did not quite fit into either side of the narrative.
Kara Walker, African/American edition 22/40, 1998, Linocut. 44 x 62 in., Photo: Courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Photo: Frank Ross
“I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all,” the artist has said, revealing the way in which her sense of self avoids the trappings of identity politics. In this way, she found herself able to bridge the divide, taking up the cut-out silhouette has a major motif in her work. “The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does,’ Walker observed.
Walker first came to prominence in 1994 with her mural, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. Using cut-paper silhouettes, she presented a wall-length scene of the Old South, replete with romance, sex, and slavery. “I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels,” Walker revealed, tapping into the heart of American culture and its adoration its own mythology.
Kara Walker, The Emancipation Approximation (Scene #18), edition 7/20, 1999-2000, Screenprint. 44 x 34 in., Photo: Courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
Walker explained, “I had a catharsis looking at early American varieties of silhouette cuttings. What I recognize, besides narrative and historicity and racism, was very physical displacement: the paradox of removing a form from a blank surface that in turn creates a black hole. I was struck by the irony of so many of my concerns being addressed: blank/black. Hole/Whole, Shadow/Substance.”
Using these dualities, Walker has brilliantly constructed elaborate tableaux of work that gracefully confronts issues of race, slavery, sexuality, identity and power. A new exhibition, Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power, currently on view at Bellevue Arts Museum, WA, through November 27, 2016, presents three of Walker’s narrative portfolios taking on Antebellum and Reconstruction-era imagery and themes.
Kara Walker, The Keys to the Coop, edition 39/40, 1997, Linoleum block. 46 X 60 1/2 in., Photo: Courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
The portfolios The Emancipation Approximation (1999–2000), Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War: Annotated (2005), and An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters (2010) present bold, often risky images that confront issues few wish to address, reminding us that we cannot bury our dirty laundry in order to avoid taking responsibility for it. While critics have argued against her approach, the true issue lies with the grotesque history of this nation that continues to play out.
By employing a style that has been reserved for the fancies and frivolities of life, Walker deftly subverts our defenses with her nightmarish lullabies of art. She reveals, “I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things—genre paintings, historical paintings—the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society.”
Kara Walker, An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters: Savant, edition 19/30, 2010, Etching with aquatint, sugar-lift, spit-bite and dry-point. 27 X 17 in., Photo: Courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
In this way, she is able to use genre styles to get closer to the truth, creating a fiction within a fiction that digs sparks unconscious recognition that is hard to fully grasp. Walker explains, “I’m fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There’s something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.”
In going into this curious and compelling netherworld, Walker takes us into a perverse sort of Wonderland, where things are both brutal and beautiful, so it becomes impossible to look away. Walker has opened Pandora’s box and In it she has found an infinite variety of unspoken memories lifted from the grave.
Kara Walker, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated): Confederate Prisoners Being Conducted from Jonesborough, edition 21/35, 2005, Offset lithography and screenprint. 39 X 53 in., Photo: Courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
