Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. At the age of 13 she moved to Atlanta, Georgia the pronounced racial division had a major impact on her and ultimately informed her work. She received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. In 1997 at the age of 27 Walker became the youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant. She has 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. The 2007 Walker Art Center–organized exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love is the artist's first full-scale U.S. museum survey. She currently lives in New York, where she is a professor of visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University.
Walker utilizes various techniques and media including painting and drawing, light projection and written text, to her well-known cut-paper silhouette installations, video and performances, like in Cut. Through her silhouetted figures she explores the representation and stereotypes of race, gender, sexuality and identity, as well as, her own place and connection to these issues. To create a silhouette Walker draws the image with a pencil and cuts the paper with an X-Acto knife and the images are adhered to paper, canvas, wood or directly to the wall with wax. The silhouettes are often part of a larger mural that creates a narrative that surrounds viewers on a life-size scale, like her piece Slavery! Slavery! The murals create a panoramic all-encompassing effect that is similar to technology that was popular at the end of the 19th century. In recent works like Darkytown Rebellion, Walker uses overhead projectors to cast color onto the walls and her silhouetted figures. When the viewer walks into the room, their body casts a shadow onto the walls becoming part of Walker’s narrative.
Walker’s work confronts the subject of race and racial stereotypes prevalent in society. For example, in Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress her precise and often exaggerated drawings of facial features, body shapes, and costume use line and form to signify the ethnicity of her subjects and comment on the way race is used to define, categorize and other individuals. Walker uses black paper on white walls, thus eliminating the need for her to create skin tones. This plays upon well-established stereotypical images in the collective mind of viewers that allow the race of characters to be identifiable through caricature.
Through her work Walker presents a complex exploration of taboo issues of sexuality, desire, pleasure, violence and shame. Work like Allegory and scenes within her larger narrative murals have elements or images dealing with such taboo issues. Sexually explicit behavior and violence are presented with meticulous clear imagery; which has created controversy around her work.
The historical setting for much of Walker’s work is the American pre—Civil War antebellum South. She often draws upon or references literature of the time period and minstrel shows of the 1830s-40s. The combination of the realism of slavery and its history and the fictional space created in her references to historical romance novels complicated Walker’s depiction of history. In much of her work, for example, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart fact, fiction, and fantasy are intertwined; exaggerated truths and fictionalized events are presented as history lessons that viewers must sort out and decide which elements are true. Through this decoding of the truth Walker comments on the way that official history is just as constructed as her stories. Issues and questions of power are raised, such as, who has the power to write history and who has the power to write others out of history? Whose voices are left out of the re-telling of history?
Walker’s tone in very satirical and critical which is evident in her use of language in the titles of her work. The titles also show the refernces to literature like Gone With the Wind or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven she draws upon a popular novel and re-tells the narrative to expose the complex, ambiguous and unsettling subject of racial representation and the history of slavery and racism in the U.S. She explores the complexity of race, gender and sexuality with critical commentary that forces the viewer to question and re-evaluate representation and history.
