Kara Walker

(American, born 1969)

Kara Walker is a contemporary African-American artist known for her exploration of race, stereotypes, gender, and identity throughout American history. She is best known for her large-scale tableaux of collaged silhouettes amidst black-and-white pastoral landscapes. Often filled with brutal and harrowing imagery, Walker provocatively illustrates the country’s origins of slavery in the antebellum South. “I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing,” the artist explained. “I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful.” Born on November 26, 1969 in Stockton, CA, the artist received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design three years later. Success came just out of school, with Walker becoming one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship at age 28. Her Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994) was an early example of the artist’s hallmark style. Influenced by Lorna Simpson and Adrian Piper, Walker continues to engage with feminism and ideals of beauty, as seen in her monumental sugar sculpture A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), which portrayed a black woman as a sphinx at the former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Walker’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.