Kara Walker
Born: November 26,
1969
Birthplace: Stockton, CA
Birthplace: Stockton, CA
Zodiac Sign:
Sagittarius
Career and Life
Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist, and filmmaker. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes.
Initially, she found herself uncomfortable and afraid to address race within her art during her early college years. However, she found her voice on this topic while attending Rhode Island School of Design for her Master's, where she began introducing race into her art. Now, she explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work.
She serves as Tepper Chair in Visual
Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She was elected
to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
In 1991, Walker received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Atlanta College of Art. In 1994, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Walker is best known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery.
She has also produced works in gouache, watercolor, video animation, shadow puppets, and "magic-lantern" projections, as well as large-scale sculptural installations like her ambitious public exhibition with Creative Time called A Subtlety (2014).
The black and white silhouettes confront the realities of history while also using the stereotypes from the era of slavery to relate to persistent modern-day concerns. Her exploration of American racism can be applied to other countries and cultures regarding relations between race and gender, reminding us of art’s power to defy conventions.
She first came to the art world's attention 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. This cut-paper silhouette mural, presenting the Antebellum south filled with sex and slavery, was an instant hit.
At 27, she became the second youngest recipient of the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant, second only to
renowned Mayanist David Stuart. In 2007, the Walker Art Center exhibition Kara
Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love was the artist's first
full-scale U.S. Museum survey.
In response to Hurricane Katrina, Walker created "After the Deluge" since the hurricane had devastated thousands of poor and Black areas of New Orleans. Walker was bombarded with news images of "black corporeality," including fatalities from the hurricane reduced to bodies and nothing more. She likened these casualties to enslaved Africans piled onto ships for the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing to America.
In February 2009, Walker a part of the inaugural exhibition of the Scaramouche Gallery, "The Practice of Joy Before Death; It Just Wouldn't Be a Party Without You."
Recent works by Kara Walker include Frum Grace and Miss
Pipi's Blue Tale (April–June 2011) at Lehmann Maupin.