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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Conversation Starter

What does history sound like?

Some works of art are just as much about hearing as they are about seeing.

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Fueled by the Classroom: Being an Artist and Educator

Art21’s senior education advisor, Joe Fusaro, shares how he makes meaningful connections between his art practice and being an arts educator.

Deep Focus

African American Artists Reconstruct the Pastoral

Anthony Merino details the necessary overhaul of art historical traditions predicated on prejudice and exclusion.

Interview

Projecting Fictions: “Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On”

Kara Walker discusses her 2002 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On).

Interview

The Melodrama of Gone with the Wind

Kara Walker talks about her interpretation of Gone with the Wind, and how it inspired her first silhouette piece, Gone, An Historical Romance of Civil War As it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of Young Negress and Her Heart.


Galleries