SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y.- The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College will present Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, through June 1, 2003. An exhibition of selected and new works by the internationally acclaimed New York-based artist, Narratives was organized jointly by the Tang Museum and the Williams College Museum of Art. The exhibition showcases the work of an artist whose anti-racist parodies-rendered in exquisitely beautiful cut-paper silhouettes-have made her one of the most important young American artists working today, according to Tang Curator Ian Berry, one of the exhibition’s four co-curators.
One of several contemporary African-American artists to address racial identity in a confrontational way, Walker is best known for life-sized black-paper cutout silhouettes that depict racial stereotypes, slavery, sex, and violence in the antebellum South. "Her charged and visceral imagery not only brings to light troubling episodes from the history of black and white relations in America," said Tang Curator Berry, "but also highlights the problems of racism, sexism, and abuse that continue into the present."
"The idea that African-American art can only be noble, appealing, and beautiful does not sit well with me," Walker has said. "I have always been drawn to art that was unsettling for me." Whether she is "on the cutting edge or over the line," the Boston Globe noted, Kara Walker is "one of the hottest-and most controversial-black artists in America."
The artworks on view in Narratives of a Negress will span the artist’s career, beginning with her installation titled Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. Described in Artnews as "lewd, provocative, and lovely," the 50-foot mural has not been on public view since its debut in 1994 at the Drawing Center in New York City. Another highlight of the Walker exhibition will be Negress Notes (Brown Follies) (1996), a series of 24 small watercolors.
Several of Walker’s artworks have elaborate titles that harken back to 19th-century slave autobiographies, such as a wall-sized panorama titled For the Benefit of All the Races of Mankind (Mos’ Specially the Master One, Boss) An Exhibition of Artifacts, Remnants, and Effluvia EXCAVATED from the Black Heart of a Negress III (2002). The installation uses colored-light projections that illuminate the cut-paper images as well as the gallery walls and ceiling with brilliant color-and simultaneously project the shadows of viewers onto the wall, mixing them into the turbulent scene itself.
As art historian Anne Wagner notes in the exhibition’s catalogue, Walker is "dead set on remembering, so as to show that the outrages of the past have had inescapable consequences for the content and formation of present-day selves. And the task of remembering has something to say about the artist’s own self-scrutiny as a black woman in America today."
Born in Stockton, Calif., in 1969, Walker moved with her family to Atlanta, Ga., when she was 13. While earning a B.F.A. degree from the Atlanta College of Art, she began combining themes of slavery, sex, and violence (drawn from such cultural influences as black memorabilia, folklore, cartoons and movies, Harlequin Romances, and slave narratives) with a most unlikely medium, the old-fashioned, genteel craft of black-paper silhouettes. As Artnews noted, that fusion "[transformed] this innocuous 19th-century technique into biting, in-your-face art."
Three months after Walker earned an M.F.A. degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994, her work appeared in a group show at New York City’s Drawing Center. After numerous solo and group exhibitions, Walker was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award at the age of 27. Her work appeared in the Whitney Museum’s 1997 Biennial and she represented the U.S. at the 2002 Sao Paulo Bienal in Brazil.
Walker lives and works in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
Besides Tang Curator Ian Berry, the exhibition’s four co-curators include Darby English, associate director of research and academic programs at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.; Vivian Patterson, curator of collections at the Williams College Museum of Art; and Mark Reinhardt, associate professor of political science at Williams College.
After its debut at the Tang, the exhibition will travel to Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., where it will be on view from Aug. 30 to Dec. 5.
Narratives of a Negress will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, co-published by the Tang Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, and MIT Press. The 208-page catalogue will be available through the Tang Museum Store.
The exhibition catalogue will be the first significant scholarly treatment of Walker and her work and will contain reproductions of the artworks; writings by the artist; and essays from co-curators English and Reinhardt, art historian Anne Wagner, and cultural critic Michele Wallace. The catalogue will consider Walker’s work from multidisciplinary perspectives, including political theory, art history, literary criticism, and cultural studies.