Artist Background

Kara Walker’s impressive style all started during her youth. She was born in 1969, in Stockton, California. At the age of 13, she and her family relocated to the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. She was accepted as a young black woman in California to be thrown into an unfamiliar area during time in Georgia when the KKK was still present; states Steel Stillman, “In the Studio Kara Walker”, Art in America.  Her large art influence at a young age wasn’t surprising since her father was an art professor himself. Because of his background, she was introduced to art at a young age in the form of drawing.Walker describes her experiences as a young woman thrown into the art world, “I began drawing strips when I was five and from then on I wanted to be a cartoonist”. When her father was the art director he allowed her to even take college classes at the age of 13. Her artistic skills were growing with her age.

        Walker began her college career and received her bachelor’s degree from Atlanta College of Art. Next she received her master’s degree at the Rhode Island School of Design where she discovered her current style, states Rhonda Stewart, Crisis. Walker’s professors suggested that she create work that was “identifiably Black,” because being “Black” was the in thing. (2) While she was being pushed into this mindset she created a character, “the Negress,” which can be seen in most of her works. She developed this character by reading romance novels about the civil war.(1) Stewart describes Walkers character, “The term shape-shifts so that at times it has applied to her as the artist and at other times it’s stereotypical dusky slave mistress in the work”.(2) Walker’s black and white work takes everything literally, and makes the viewer figure out who the characters are based off of stereotypes. Sterman discusses the role of the black and white characters, “The slave figures are recognizable, with their thick lips or kinky hair, while the masters have sharp features. But the figures often bleed into each other, connected or contorted in jarring ways. The roles of victim and victimizer aren’t always clear".(2) A curator at the Tang teaching Museum and 
Art Gallery describes Kara’s works, “No matter how much you know about [Walker] or know about her work, you’re still uneasy. In that place of being unsettled, that’s where real transformation can happen. In that experience, true dialogue and conversation can happen”.(2) Her style makes it easy to understand why she did choose the silhouettes, they give the viewer a choice to make the stereotype real. Her work allows the viewer to learn to subtract from race and learn from their thoughts.

        With Kara’s strong works it’s easy to understand how she could be recognized worldwide. At the age of 27, in 1997, Kara won a “Genius” award from the MacArthur Foundation.(2) In 2002 her work was sent around the world in an exhibition from Sao Paulo Bienal in Brazil to the Centre d’Arte Contemporain in Geneva. Currently, Kara is an art professor at Columbia University in New York, where she is teaching at the School of Visual Arts.  

1. "Inside the Studio; Kara Walker." Interview by Steel Stillman. Art in America May 2011: 88-95. Print.
2. Stewart, Rhonda. "Still Here: Artist Kara Walker in Black and White." Crisis 111.1

Kara Walker is known for her black and white silhouettes depicting fornication, defecation and other various disgusting acts. With this piece, I wanted to incorporate Kara Walker’s grotesque style. In my photograph there is a boy pictured after he has vomited similar to imagery seen in much of Walker’s work. My photograph also covers controversial subject matter such as the eating disorder known as bulimia. The high contrast of the black and whites give the photograph a similar feel as Walker’s silhouettes. There is a lack of detail provided by Kara’s pieces, but that lack of detail with the high contrast silhouettes creates the story. l tried to create the same feeling of disgust that the viewer would obtain from viewing a piece of Walker’s work.

Style

           To further understand the process of Kara Walker we should examine the style and format in which she choses to create her work. Walker has gained a massive amount of notoriety as the creator of large, panoramic black silhouetted cutouts of scenes depicting slavery, explicit pornographic situations, and master and slave sexual relations. (1) “She pairs these cutouts with evocative pseudo-romantic texts, which she writes herself, concerning the exploits of dusky maidens caught up in elusive fantasy scenarios of rebellion, sabotage, revolution and murder.” Walker’s narratives evoke the past in their content and format. (1) “Walkers classic art, black cut-paper silhouettes, is itself a throwback to another era, and a distancing feature that enables her to evoke the past in order to criticize both it and its’ legacy in the present”.(2)  By examining the issue of Physiognomy, the idea that identity can be determined by external appearances, Walker expresses and confronts issues such as racism through the use of caricatures with stereotypical physical features.(3) Walker herself says the use of such a medium allows her to “set up a situation where the viewer calls up a stereotypic response to the work – that I, the black artist/leader, will “tell it like it is. But the “like it is,” the truth of the piece, is as clear as a Rorschach test.”(1) By expressing elements such as stereotypes and caricatures through the use of a historical medium, Walker not only provides us with controversial subject matter but invokes controversial responses from her viewers as well.

-Gregory Lahm

1. Walker, Kara Elizabeth., and Ian Berry. Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress. Saratoga Springs, NY: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2003. Print.

2.   Walker, Kara Elizabeth., Annette Dixon, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Thelma Golden.Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002. Print.

3. "In the Studio: Kara Walker." Interview by Steel Stillman. Art in America May 2011: 88-95. Print.

     The image above is a personal work I created in a similar style to that of Kara Walker. The image shows a high contrast black silhouetted figure of a woman feeding a cat. I utilized my understanding of the artists work by replicating the effect she creates with her black cut out figures in high contrast with their background. Although stylistically I utilized a similar medium, contextually I decided to deviate from the content Kara Walker typically focuses on. Where as she utilizes historical controversial subject matter for her works, I decided to focus on a far less explicit subject. Through creation of this piece I have learned that although the majority of the detail in this image is omitted by use of silhouettes, the simple black images provide great insight as to what is being conveyed as well as allowing plenty of room for viewer interpretation. 

-Gregory Lahm 

Symbolism

Kara Walker, an artist that exposes the impossibility of moral absolutes within the dynamics of domination, a predicament that Kara uses in her art and that deals with racism, sexism, and the overall horror of slavery and plantation life; such as slave hunts, mutilations, rape, and murder. Kara Walker’s art illuminates certain allegorical meanings, philosophical associations, and visual references and through years of misrepresentation of the African American race, she uses stereotypes, contradictions, and acts of brutality in her artworks as these underlying subjects in which this glossary of symbols for example; hoop skirts, boots, shoes, knives, razor blades, Ropes, water, birth, and breast milk that makes up Kara Walker silhouettes.  

The Hoop skirt, a symbol of mortality and the typical fashion statement of southern women before the civil war, is very present in Walker’s imagery in depicting both the mistresses as well as the slaves, not necessarily to protect their virtue, but to disguise their own repressed desires.(1) The antebellum plantation is the first experiment of Walker ‘s in which she uses depictions that establishes not only the historical and geographical references, but also a psychological terrain in which the cast shadows of masters and slaves embody the repressed prejudices, desires, and obsessions that the contemporary American (black or white) refuses to acknowledge, visualize, and resolve.(1)

 “ Like clothing, footwear carries symbolic potency and poetry in walker’s imagery, helping to expose complex connections and reveal hidden plots and desires.”- Yasmil Raymond. (1) Some situations the boots mean some form of an affectionate relationship in others a sense of defiance.

Mutilations, murders, and suicides are common occurrences in Walker’s fantasized version of antebellum south. Where masters, mistresses, and slave alike afflict their deepest internal conflicts upon one another.(1) When Walker depicts children as executioners, she spear to the manner in which their unspoiled honesty, or innocence absolves them from maliciousness, to the point of being almost self defensive.(1)

Images of ships, tidal waves washtubs, and sea monster in Walker’s work are reference to the transatlantic encounters between the European and Africans. The association between the brutal violence of the transatlantic slave trade and the dangers of the deep water are both represented in Walker’s artwork. (1)

            “Infants and toddlers appear in a multiplicity of vulnerable situations, falling lifeless to the ground, dangling from delicate umbilical cords, or clinging to a mother breast”- Yasmil Raymond .(1)  Symbolically, birth connotes origin. The representation of birth encapsulates not only self- preservation but also self- destruction. During slavery, breeding was a method of control, for the slave women to be bred; abortion was a sign of rebellion, a powerful gesture of revolt against the “system”. Walker’s allegorical figures of men giving birth to fetuses attached to their umbilical cords symbolized that an odd motherhood experience. Instead of the vagina in which a female has the male has to give birth through his anus. The newborns are sadly lifeless and are falling to the ground, but to have the man become a surrogate is a sign of surrender and evokes the forced denial of parenthood and family ancestor under slavery.

Similar to that of the boots and footwear the defecating in public is a sign of obscenity, disobedience and defiance. And also symbolize the vulnerability and weakness of the African American. (1)

Some Slave women served as nursemaids to the mistress’ children and some as birth mothers of the masters’ illegitmate children. Procreation was crucial in the mechanisms and calculations of the plantations slavery in the south. There are several depictions of breastfeeding that inspire association with nourishment and motherhood or in some cases fatherhood, as well as affirming the lineage that slaves were denied, and considering that the”… Ancestry is the fluid that flows in Walker’s breastfeeding imagery…” the use of this imagery really hits home to African Americans who can not trace the heritage back generations and generations (1).

Through and through Kara walker’s erotic, disturbing, and slightly nauseating imagery hold so much more meaning than what meets the eye, and the symbols she uses are utilized to evoke that nauseating feeling. And to think that its all done through the use of black paper and silhouettes and a little bit of detail, and the audiences own mind to have the whole come together is awe- inspiring.

-Komikka Patton

BIbliography

1.Vergne, Philippe. Kara Walker My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love : [catalog of an Exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minn., Minnesota, Feb. 17-May 13, 2007 ; ARC Musée D'art Moderne De La Ville De Paris, June 19 - September 9, 2007 ; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, Nov. 11, 2007-Feb. 3, 2008 ; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Calif., Feb. 17-May 11, 2008]. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007. Print.

Kara Walker’s lack of color, absorption of all the colors compiled into silhouettes, BLACK paper on a WHITE walls, inspired me, provoked me, and stirred something in me, to create this piece. Her stereotypical, grotesque, overly sexual, and deeply disturbing images motivated me to look deeper than just black on white literally and figuratively. I took her idea of using simple materials and black paper, and the white of the paper, with another touch of graphite and produced a Kara Walker look alike with a grey scale twist. Although the situation being depicted in my piece is “Black on Black” the sexual atmosphere is still present with the absence of the explicit and erotic details that she put forward. Walker’s idea that the audience would tell the story in there own mind, considering everything is black, enthused me to use that same idea to tell a story about my own family member who, although was not put in the same situations as the slaves, she was used in a sexual way by someone with a sense of domination over her.  Kara Walker’s idea seemed like a perfect fit to help tell my story.

-Komikka Patton

Bibliography

"In The Studio: Kara Walker." Interview by Steel Stillman. Art in America May 2011: 88-95. Print.

Stewart, Rhonda. "Still Here: Artist Kara Walker in Black and White." Crisis 111.1

Vergne, Philippe. Kara Walker My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love : [catalog of an Exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minn., Minnesota, Feb. 17-May 13, 2007 ; ARC Musée D'art Moderne De La Ville De Paris, June 19 - September 9, 2007 ; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, Nov. 11, 2007-Feb. 3, 2008 ; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Calif., Feb. 17-May 11, 2008]. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007. Print.

Walker, Kara Elizabeth., and Ian Berry. Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress. Saratoga Springs, NY: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2003. Print.

Walker, Kara Elizabeth., Annette Dixon, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Thelma Golden.Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002. Print.