Kara Walker

This extensive wall installation, the artist's first foray into the New York art world, features what would become her signature style. The work's epic title refers to numerous sources, including Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) set during the Civil War, and a passage in Thomas Dixon, Jr's The Clansman (a foundational Ku Klux Klan text) devoted to the manipulative power of the "tawny negress." The form of the tableau, with its silhouetted figures in 19^th-century costume leaning toward one another beneath the moon, alludes to storybook romance. The tableau fails to deliver on this promise when we notice the graphic depictions of sex and violence that appear on close inspection, including a diminutive figure strangling a web-footed bird, a young woman floating away on the water (perhaps the mistress of the gentleman engaged in flirtation at the left) and, at the highest midpoint of the composition, where we can't miss it, underage interracial fellatio.

Silhouetting was an art form considered "feminine" in the 19^th 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."

This and several other works by Walker are displayed in curved spaces. Taking its cue from the cyclorama, a 360-degree view popularized in the 19^th century, its form surrounds us, alluding to the inescapable horror of the past - and the cycle of racial inequality that continues to play itself out in history. With its life-sized figures and grand title, this scene evokes history painting (considered the highest art in the 19^th century, and used to commemorate grand events). Loosely inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous abolitionist novel of 1852) it surrounds us with a series of horrifying vignettes reenacting the torture, murder and assault on the enslaved population of the American South. These include two women and a child nursing each other, three small children standing around a mistress wielding an axe, a peg-legged gentleman resting his weight on a saber, pinning one child to the ground while sodomizing another, and a man with his pants down linked by a cord (umbilical or fecal) to a fetus.

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.

Walker's critical perceptions of the history of race relations are by no means limited to negative stereotypes. Many of her most powerful works of the 1990s target celebrated, indeed sanctified milestones in abolitionist history. Her apparent lack of reverence for these traditional heroes and willingness to revise history as she saw fit disturbed many viewers at the time. Untitled (John Brown), substantially revises a famous moment in the life of abolitionist hero John Brown, a figure sent to the gallows for his role in the raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, but ultimately celebrated for his enlightened perspective on race. Astonished witnesses accounted that on his way to his own execution, Brown stopped to kiss a black child in the arms of its mother. In a famous lithograph by Currier and Ives, Brown stands heroically at the doorway to the jailhouse, unshackled (a significant historical omission), while the mother and child receive his kiss. Walker's depiction offers us a different tale, one in which a submissive, half-naked John Brown turns away in apparent pain as an upright, impatient mother thrusts the baby toward him. The child pulls forcefully on his sagging nipple (unable to nourish in a manner comparable to that of the slave women expected to nurse white children). Brown's inability to provide sustenance is a strong metaphor for the insufficiency of opposition to slavery, which did not end. Additionally, the arrangement of Brown with slave mother and child weaves in the insinuation of interracial sexual relations, alluding to the expectation for women to comply with their masters' advances. By casting heroic figures like John Brown in a critical light, and creating imagery that contrasts sharply with the traditional mythology surrounding this encounter, the artist is asking us to reexamine whether we think they are worthy of heroic status.

"I wanted to make a piece that was incredibly sad," Walker stated in an interview regarding this work. "I wanted to make a piece that was about something that couldn't be stated or couldn't be seen." Against a dark background, white swans emerge, glowing against the black backdrop. As our eyes adjust to the light, it becomes apparent that there are black silhouettes of human heads attached to the swans' necks. Flanking the swans are three blind figures, one of whom is removing her eyes, and on the right, a figure raising her arm in a gesture of triumph that recalls the figure of liberty in Delacroix's Lady Liberty Leading the People. The procession is enigmatic and, like other tableaus by Walker, leaves the interpretation up to the viewer. Like other works by Walker in the 1990s, this received mixed reviews. Some critics found it brave, while others found it offensive. While her work is by no means universally appreciated, in retrospect it is easier to see that her intention was to advance the conversation about race.

Having made a name for herself with cut-out silhouettes, in the early 2000s Walker began to experiment with light-based work. In Darkytown Rebellion, in addition to the silhouetted figures (over a dozen) pasted onto 37 feet of a corner gallery wall, Walker projected colored light onto the ceiling, walls, and floor. The effect creates an additional experiential, even psychedelic dimension to the work. Shadows of visitor's bodies - also silhouettes - appear on the same surfaces, intermingling with Walker's cast. With their human scale, her installation implicates the viewer, and color, as opposed to black and white, links it to the present. Our shadows mingle with the silhouettes of fictitious stereotypes, inviting us to compare the two and challenging us to decide where our own lives fit in the progression of history.

This work, Walker's largest and most ambitious work to date, was commissioned by the public arts organization Creative Time, and displayed in what was once the largest sugar refinery in the world. The monumental form, coated in white sugar and on view at the defunct Domino Sugar plant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, evoked the racist stereotype of "mammy" (nurturer of white families), with protruding genitals that hyper-sexualize the sphinx-like figure. Attending her were sculptures of young black boys, made of molasses and resin that melted away in the summer heat over the course of the exhibition. Sugar in the raw is brown. White sugar, a later invention, was bleached by slaves until the 19^th century in greater and greater quantities to satisfy the Western appetite for rum and confections. Sugar cane was fed manually to the mills, a dangerous process that resulted in the loss of limbs and lives. This site-specific work, rich with historical significance - calls our attention to the geo-political circumstances that produced, and continue to perpetuate, social, economic, and racial inequity. A powerful gesture commemorating undocumented experiences of oppression, it also called attention to the changing demographics of a historically industrial and once working-class neighborhood, now being filled with upscale apartments. Sugar Sphinx shares an air of mystery with Walker's silhouettes.