Summary
Fresh out of graduate school, Kara Walker succeeded in shocking the nearly shock-proof art world of the 1990s with her wall-sized cut paper silhouettes. At first, the figures in period costume seem to hearken back to an earlier, simpler time. That is, until we notice the horrifying content: nightmarish vignettes illustrating the history of the American South. Drawing from sources ranging from slave testimonials to historical novels, Kara Walker's work features mammies, pickaninnies, sambos and other brutal stereotypes in a host of situations that are frequently violent and sexual in nature. Initial audiences condemned her work as obscenely offensive, and the art world was divided about what to do. Was this a step backward or forward for racial politics? Several decades later, Walker continues to make audacious, challenging statements that question and challenge. From her breathtaking and horrifying silhouettes to the enormous crouching sphinx cast in white sugar and displayed in an old sugar factory in Brooklyn, Walker demands that we examine the origins of racial inequality, in ways that transcend black and white.
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994)
Silhouetting was an art form considered "feminine" in the 19th century, and it may well have been within reach of female African American artists. Walker uses it to revisit the idea of race, and to highlight the artificiality of that century's practices such as physiognomic theory and phrenology (pseudo-scientific practices of deciphering a person's intelligence level by examining the shape of the face and head) used to support racial inequality as somehow "natural." Walker's black cut-outs against white backgrounds derive their power from the silhouette, a stark form capable of conveying multiple visual and symbolic meanings. Fanciful details, such as the hoop-skirted woman at the far left under whom there are two sets of legs, and the lone figure being carried into the air by an enormous erection, introduce a dimension of the surreal to the image. When asked what she had been thinking about when she made this work, Walker responded, "The history of America is built on this inequality...The gross, brutal manhandling of one group of people, dominant with one kind of skin color and one kind of perception of themselves, versus another group of people with a different kind of skin color and a different social standing. And the assumption would be that, well, times changed and we've moved on. But this is the underlying mythology... And we buy into it. I mean, whiteness is just as artificial a construct as blackness is."
The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995)
Walker's use of the silhouette, which depicts everything on the same plane and in one color, introduces an element of formal ambiguity that lends itself to multiple interpretations. For example, is the leg under the peg-legged figure part of the child's body or the man's? What is the substance connecting the two figures on the right? We would need more information to decide what we are looking at, a reductive property of the silhouette that aligns it with the stereotype we may want to question.