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 recent works like “Darkytown
Rebellion” (2000), the artist uses overhead projectors to throw
colored light onto the ceiling, walls, and floor of the exhibition
space. When the viewer walks into the
installation,
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. Walker’s work has been exhibited
at the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of
American Art. A 1997 recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation Achievement Award, Walker was the United States representative
to the 2002 São Paolo Bienal in Brazil. Walker currently
lives in New York where she is on the faculty of the MFA program
at Columbia University.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York | Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Kara Walker on the Art21 blog |
