Kara Walker- Biography, Works and Percpetions

 Kara Walker

 Biography:

African American Contemporary installation artist and filmmaker, currently based in New York. Born in 1969, in California. Her father, Larry Walker, was an art professor at the University of The Pacific. She attended Atlanta  College of Art in 1991, then Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 for a master's degree. Her Father noted that she showed promise even as a very young artist, of course, this may have been a somewhat biased perspective coming from a parent. From age 13 she was raised in Atlanta Georgia, which is when she says her work began to become critical of the racism around her. She has received many awards, including being one of the youngest to receive the MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997 and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. In 2012, Walker became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And then In 2015, she was named the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her work can be found in museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art both in New York. And The Tate Gallery in London; Rome and Frankfurt. Walker uses several mediums including but not limited to an overhead projector, paper silhouettes, paint, and print-maker. She presents her work in collages, with shadow puppetry, animation, sculpture, and film video. 

 

Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good  Intentions (2004)

A short, silent 16mm that tells the story of masters and slaves. A young black enslaved woman escapes by killing her white master who we are to believe is her lover. Told with shadow puppets and title cards. In the 5-screen video installation. The hands of the puppet master are often in full view, hinting at the obvious manipulation of the worldview slave owners and now lawmakers have on the lives of people of colour. 

Perceptions of Walker's work: 

 Her piece Darkytown Rebellion(2001) at first glance may seem whimsical, with its bright background colours, and silhouettes Caricatures that have similar traits to the animated Disney cartoon. “Alice and Wonderland” mirrors how the southern states perceived themselves in  the Antebellum period.  This piece requires the viewer to critically assess the piece as whole to fully comprehend it. Just as the south hoped to be viewed as a whimsical wonderland of relaxation upon a more in-depth analysis of the society it would become clear to an outsider that there was consistent violence, and power struggles due to race and gender. Walker’s piece engages the audience leading them on a path to experience this realization for themselves. 

When Walker’s piece was first exhibited the picturesque idea of Slavery was still being presented by the American South as a romanticized part of history, children were taught in school that it wasn’t that bad for slaves, and that some were happy. 

Current Work:

This work Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies, (2021).12-minute stop-motion animation Walker’s paper silhouettes reenact several of the most gruesome and infamous acts of white supremacist violence in recent American history. The piece is inspired by the flood of white supremacist rhetoric within the mainstream political discourse and media in the last several years. See stills from the piece below.