Kara Walker

Some Facts on 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 connection between race, gender, and humor through her iconic silhouetted figures.

• 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.

• Walker currently lives in New York where she is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University.

More fun facts about Kara Walker:

• Since that time, she has created more than 30 room-size installations and hundreds of drawings and watercolors, and has been the subject of more than 40 solo exhibitions. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award (1997) and, most recently, the Deutsche Bank Prize (2004) and the Larry Aldrich Award (2005).

• She was the United States representative for the 25th International São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2002).

Influence:

“One of my earliest memories

involves sitting on my dad’s lap

in his studio in the garage of

our house and watching him

draw. I remember thinking: ‘I

want to do that, too,’ and I

pretty much decided then and

there at age 2½ or 3 that I

was an artist just like Dad.” —

Kara Walker

Big Ideas!• Race• Power

• Narrative• Humor

• Collision of Fact and Fiction

• Story telling

• “Most [of my] pieces have to do with exchanges of power, attempts to steal power away from others.” —Kara Walker

• Kara draws her silhouettes directly onto the wall in which she is working

• She later goes back and hand cuts them out leaving what is left on the walls using adhesive.

• She uses overhead projectors to incorporate light with her pieces. It forces the viewer to become a part of the story upon entering, displaying their own shadow on the walls

“I knew for a while that I wanted to make a piece that tried to engage the space a little bit more directly then the pieces that are

just cut paper on the wall. And I had been using the overhead projectors as a kind of a shadow play tool. Not really as a tool for

making the work—they’re usually hand drawn. But I wanted to activate the space in a way and have these overhead projectors

serve as a kind of stand-in for the viewer, as observers. And my thinking about the overhead projectors connected with my thinking about painting as far as creating an illusion of depth, but in a very

mundane, flat, almost didactic way.”

Why use projections?

Why use projections cont."...I wanted to activate the space in a way and have these overhead projectors serve as a kind of stand-in for the viewer, as observers."

"Projections came about as one of a series of steps. It’s an easy answer to the idea of projecting. Projecting one’s desires, fears, and conditions onto other bodies, which all of my work has tried to engage with using the silhouette. And it also created a space

where the viewer’s shadow would also be projected into the scene so that maybe they would, you know, become captured and

implicated in a way that is very didactic. Overhead projectors are a didactic tool, they’re a schoolroom tool. So they’re about

conveying facts. The work that I do is about projecting fictions into those facts."

Kara Walker on being an artist:“I knew that if I was going to make work

that had to deal with race issues, they were going to be full of contradictions. Because I always felt that it's really a love affair that we've got going in this country, a love affair with the idea of

it [race issues], with the notion of major conflict that needs to be

overcome and maybe a fear of what happens when that thing is overcome-

- And, of course, these issues also translate into [the] very personal: Who

am I beyond this skin I'm in?”

Key Questions:• What stories do you see when you look at

Kara Walker’s work?

• What do her silhouettes remind you of?

• What kind of story would you tell through your silhouettes?

• What kind of issues would you bring out in your stories?

• Who/What are your influences?

Artist Practice

Using the materials provided, black paper, glue sticks and scissors, create a silhouette scene in your sketchbook. Reflect on Kara Walker’s process as you do this. Try to create a narrative not just a bunch of shapes cut out and glued.