NEW YORK.- The Studio Museum in Harlem presents an installation by Kara Walker, one of the most important African-American artists working today. Specifically designed for the Studio Museum’s main gallery, this installation is an excerpt from Walker’s current traveling exhibition, Narratives of a Negress. Organized by The Tang Teaching Museum and the Williams College Museum of Art, the works in Narratives of a Negress span the artist’s career.
Walker describes the installation at the Studio Museum as ”portions of an endless and epic cycle of retribution and retaliation, [where] Negro and Whitey stereotypes reenact with histrionic aplomb the circumstances of their coming into being.” The Studio Museum’s installation also will be accompanied by “American Primitives,” a series of Walker’s collages on board.
Walker is best known for her life-sized black-paper cutout silhouettes that depict racial stereotypes, slavery, sex, and violence in the antebellum South. She first came to the world’s attention in 1994 when the Drawing Center in New York City presented a work that comprised only spare, expertly drawn silhouette forms cut from black paper and pasted directly onto the white walls.
“The power of the work lay [at the Drawing Center] in its combination of severe visual understatement with caustic content, where picturesque antebellum imagery mingled strikingly with cultural stereotypes. Some critics charged Walker with impropriety, while others praised her skill and inventiveness. But all agreed that her art pushed hot buttons, and did so beautifully,” according to Darby English, Narratives co-curator, associate director of research and academic programs at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. Since 1997, Walker’s work has been the subject of much debate within the African-American community.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity for the Studio Museum to exhibit Kara Walker’s installation, while a major survey of her work is on view at the Williams College Museum of Art,” says Thelma Golden, Studio Museum chief curator and deputy director for exhibitions and programs. “Throughout her career, Kara has challenged and changed the way we look at and understand American history. Her work is provocative and emotionally wrenching, yet overwhelmingly beautiful and intellectually compelling. She has defined and refined her vocabulary and this installation represents a glimpse of what we have to look forward to as her work continues to develop.”
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.
