Kara Walker
Kara Walker
Kara Elizabeth Walkeris an African American contemporary artist and painter who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker lives in New York and has taught extensively at Columbia University. She is currently serving a five-year term as Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth26 November 1969
CountryUnited States of America
To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what's not working and challenge it. You riff on things.
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.
Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not.
I trust my hand. If I go into a space with a roll of paper, I can make a work, some kind of work, and feel pretty satisfied.
Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.
The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us - viewer and maker - in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.
As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win - or just not be so sad!
I don't know how much I believe in redemptive stories, even though people want them and strive for them.
I took a political stance early on, but I don't think my work is overtly political. I respond to events.
My work is really abject and self-effacing sometimes. I mean, it's big and overwrought, but it's just paper dolls, and it's kind of silly.
The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.
A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.
I am performing this role of the artist and this role of the 'negress' coming into a white-box institution. It's kind of a self-appointed role: the self-designated negress.
I don't think that my work is very moralistic - at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonising tendency, and I don't think visual work operates like that.