Walker, Kara 1969-

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WALKER, Kara 1969-

PERSONAL:

Born 1969, in Stockton, CA; daughter of Larry (an art professor) and Gwen Walker; married Klaus Burgel (a jewelry designer), March, 1996; children: Octavia. Ethnicity: "African American." Education: Atlanta College of Art, B.A., 1991; Rhode Island School of Design, M.F.A., 1994.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, MIT Press, 28 Carleton St., Cambridge, MA 02142.

CAREER:

Artist. Columbia University, New York, NY, faculty member in M.F.A. program. Exhibitions: Work included in exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York, NY, 1994; Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Whitney Museum of American Art. First solo show at Brent Sikkema and Wooster Gardens, New York, 1996.

AWARDS, HONORS:

MacArthur Foundation grant, 1997; U.S. representative to São Paolo Bienal, São Paolo, Brazil, 2002.

WRITINGS:

(With others) Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

"Few artists in the second half of the twentieth century have ignited as much controversy around their art" as has Kara Walker, observed Deborah Jean Johnson in Contemporary Women Artists. Walker achieved both notoriety and acclaim in the art world while still in her twenties. Her nearly life-size, black-paper-cutout silhouettes illustrate plantation scenes from rape to lynchings, but infuse a modern irony that exposes the physical and sexual exploitation rampant during the U.S. Civil War-era South. "I decided, if I'm going to delve into race and racism, as was expected of me as an African-American artist," Walker explained to Catherine Fox in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, "I was going to pull out the stops."

Characters in a Walker installation are often stereotypical plantation inhabitants, from pickaninny children to mammies to the "old slave." In depicting interactions between blacks and whites, and between blacks and blacks, Walker blurs the boundary between victim and victimizer. Her artworks present contradictory feelings side by side, as blacks are shown being both attracted to whiteness and repelled by whites' exploitation of them, and admiring of African-American heroes while at the same time mocking themselves as blacks. Discussing Walker's work in the New York Times, Holland Cotter stated that "Her blacks don't resist aggression, or at least not in obvious ways. They seem to give in to it, let themselves be abjectly used, often by one another. Whites in Ms. Walker's art often seem passive by comparison, but racial fates are intertwined. Everyone is down there together in the mud." "Walker exploits clichés in order to unmask false preconceptions and stereotypes," remarked Lynn Gumpert in Artnews.

Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California, the youngest of three children of Larry and Gwen Walker. Her sensibility as an artist was shaped to a large extent after she moved to Stone Mountain, Georgia, at age thirteen. Stone Mountain has been cited at the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, and the teenage Walker was keenly aware of the contrast between Southern gentility and prejudice entrenched in white culture there. "For the first time, she experienced both overt racism and 'Southern hospitality,' where, as she puts it, a 'layer of sweetness coats everything'," remarked Gumpert of Walker's experience. Before long Walker was questioning the mythology of the South, simultaneously celebrating it and refuting it. Walker and a friend scavenged at gift shops for Confederate memorabilia, and she began collecting racist images, such as African-American children eating watermelon.

Walker enrolled at the Atlanta College of Art in 1987 and obtained her bachelor's degree in 1991. She had been developing ideas about the dynamics of race in society, but also became intrigued by romance novels. "I was … interested in the way romance and pornographic novels encourage readers to participate in their own rape-submission to the desire to be the heroine," Walker remarked to Fox in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. "I began thinking about the parallels with slave narratives. What would my romance novel be?" Her work was also partly inspired by pulp fiction that explored passionate interracial love in the antebellum South. After putting all these concepts together, "race, identity, sexuality, and complicity," as she told Fox, Walker searched for an appropriate medium and settled on the silhouette. Her choice of that medium "is not arbitrary," Johnson noted in Contemporary Women Artists, "but rather is purposefully intended to situate her characters and the audience in historical time."

While earning her master of fine arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, Walker began exhibiting pieces at galleries around Atlanta and Providence, and just three months after graduating, her silhouettes were part of a show at the Drawing Center in New York City. Her fifty-foot mural "Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart" set the art world abuzz, leading to a rapid-fire succession of shows around New York City and Boston. Walker's solo premiere came in 1996 at New York's Brent Sikkema and Wooster Gardens, and included the shocking piece "Gaining," which depicts an African-American girl carrying what appears to be a man's genitals.

Walker's art continues to stir debate both for its complex imagery and ambiguous meanings. Her works initially seem straightforward or innocent but are laced with images of violence and perversity. A case in point is the 1995 installation "The Battle of Atlanta," which depicts a young boy and a girl, dressed in paper soldier's hat and crinolines respectively, carrying a dagger while headed toward a naked black woman chained to a tree. Discussing the installation, Gumpert wrote that "The work engages viewers with its deceptive simplicity and seemingly playful narrative, only to revolt them, compelling them to look in spite of themselves."

Not surprisingly, Walker's work has elicited an emotional response from many African Americans. Some critics have expressed distaste for her use of stereotypes and suggest that they serve to reinforce negative attitudes rather than defuse them; in 1997 a group of African-American artists mounted a letter-writing campaign protesting her use of racist images. Other critics insist that her work deserves credit for the dialogue it provokes about troublesome societal issues. As Jeff Daniel observed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Walker's efforts are "a way of appropriating dangerous images for a deep, often traumatic examination of racial and sexual power and oppression."

Walker has continued to expand on her signature silhouette installations. In works like "Darkytown Rebellion" she overlays images with multicolored projected landscapes. "When the viewer walks into the installation," explained a contributor to the Public Broadcasting System Web site, "his or her body casts a shadow onto the walls where it mingles with Walker's black-paper figures and landscapes. With one foot in the historical realism of slavery and the other in the fantastical space of the romance novel, Walker's nightmarish fictions simultaneously seduce and implicate the audience."

2003 saw the publication of Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, "an excellent overview and analysis of an inventive artist dealing aesthetically with issues of race and gender," remarked Library Journal reviewer Douglas F. Smith. The work features photographs of Walker's silhouette installations, as well as examples of her drawings and watercolors, and it includes essays by four critics and scholars reflecting on Walker's art. The work is also notable, according to Johanna Branson in the Women's Review of Books, for its selection of writings by Walker, reproduced as they were created on a set of index cards. As Branson noted, "The voice that comes across most clearly in this catalogue is Walker's."

Walker is committed to evolving as an artist. As she told Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire interviewer Tommy Lott, "Being an artist is pretty much a lifelong pursuit; I never planned on being anything else. That much is already clear; I've set my parameters that somehow I'm involved in art."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 16, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Contemporary Women Artists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Jenkins, Sidney, Slice of Hand: The Silhouette Art of Kara Walker, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), 1995.

Newsmakers 1999, Issue 2, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Artforum, September, 1996, Thelma Golden, "Oral Mores: A Postbellum Shadow Play," pp. 92-93

Artforum International, November, 2001, Nico Golden, "Kara Walker: Brent Sikkema," pp. 145-146; October, 2003, Frances Richard, "Kara Walker: Brent Sikkema," p. 169.

Art in America, September, 1996, pp. 106-107; February, 1999, Nancy Princenthal, "Kara Walker at Wooster Gardens," p. 106; January, 2002, Eleanor Heartney, "Kara Walker at Brent Sikkema," p. 103.

Art in New England, December, 1995-January, 1996, Alexi Worth, "Black and White and Kara Walker"; June-July, 1998, p. 29.

Art Journal, winter, 2001, John P. Bowles, "Blinded by the White," pp. 39-42.

ARTnews, January, 1997, Lynn Gumpert, "Kara Walker: Anything but Black and White," p. 136; September, 1999, "Controversial Silhouette," p. 45; April, 2002, Hilarie M. Sheets, "Cut It Out!," pp. 126-129.

Atlanta Journal and Constitution, June 17, 1997, p. A1; July 6, 1997, p. L1; October 19, 1997, p. L4; March 15, 1998, p. L1; March 20, 1998, p. H5; July 12, 1998, p. L6.

Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, fall, 2000, Tommy Lott, "Kara Walker Speaks," p. 69, and Herman Gray, "Cultural Politics as Outrage(ous)," p. 92.

Boston Globe, March 13, 1998, Christine Temin, "Recasting Racism or Renewing It?"

Essence, February 1, 2004, Jorge Arango, "Our Past in Black and White," p. 108.

Flash Art, November-December, 1996, Jerry Saltz, "Kara Walker: Ill-Will and Desire."

Grand Street, fall, 1996, p. 34.

Index, February, 1996, Alexander Alberro, "Kara Walker."

International Review of African American Art, spring, 1998, "Much Ado," p. 44, "Tidings of … Joy?," pp. 44-45, "'Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,'" pp. 46-47, and Juliette Bowles, "Editor's Response," pp. 50-51.

Interview, November, 1998, James Hannaham, interview with Walker, pp. 114-119.

Library Journal, March 15, 2003, Douglas F. Smith, review of Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, p. 81.

Los Angeles Times, October 14, 1997, p. F1.

New Art Examiner, May, 1996, pp. 49-50; April, 1997, pp. 41-42.

New York Times, May 5, 1995, p. C30; April 5, 1996, p. C28; November 20, 1998, p. E43; September 28, 2001, Roberta Smith, "Kara Walker: 'American Primitive'"; December 28, 2001, Carol Vogel, "Artist Is Chosen"; May 9, 2003, Holland Cotter, "A Nightmare View of Antebellum Life That Sets off Sparks," p. E36; June 27, 2003, Ken Johnson, "Kara Walker," p. E29.

New York Times Book Review, March 23, 1997, p. 48.

New York Times Magazine, March 23, 1997, pp. 48-50.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 26, 1998, p. D3.

Village Voice, April 9, 1996, p. 81.

Women's Review of Books, January, 2004, Johanna Branson, "Beyond the Controversy."