Kara Walker
Kara Walker was born in
Stockton, California, in 1969. She received a BFA from the Atlanta College of
Art in 1991, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. The
artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality
through her iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally
proper Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the
gallery, creating a theatrical space in which her unruly cut-paper characters
fornicate and inflict violence on one another.
In works like Darkytown Rebellion (2000), the artist
uses overhead projectors to throw colored light onto the ceiling, walls, and
floor of the exhibition space; the lights cast a shadow of the viewer’s body
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.
Walker’s work has been
exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York. A 1997 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Walker was the
United States representative to the 2002 Bienal de São Paulo. Walker currently
lives in New York, where she is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia
University.
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Art by Kara Walker
