Kara Walker: 1999-2005

New York-based artist Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. The current exhibition focuses on work make between 1999 and 2005.

“Satirizing clearly prescribed and highly codified tenets is the modus operandi for Walker’s ribald reworking of the category of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history painting…”

—Robert Hobbs

“… there are the silent notes and things from the Klan. It only happened once but it had enough of an impact on me. It threw me from the present happiness all the way into what I thought was the distant past—but really it isn’t so far removed. That is where this tableau comes from: as a way to recapitulate all of this and to have some impact on the viewer.”

—Kara Walker

“In her work, she “exaggerate[s] the exaggerations” that Frederick Douglass described in 1849 and reenacts the masking of Blacks in blackface, which has the cumulative effect of placing these stereotypes in even higher relief. To them she adds the additional masquerade created by white shadows in blackface to demonstrate the wide-ranging authority of our dominant ideologies that mediate our present as well as our past and provide us with seemingly trivial escape routes such as Harlequin and Silhouette romances that are actually user-friendly prisons.”

—Robert Hobbs

“The silhouette speaks a king of truth. It traces an exact profile, so in a way I’d like to set up a situation where the viewer calls up a stereotypic response to the work—that I, black artist/leader, will “tell it like it is.” But the “like it is,” the truth of the piece, is as clear as a Rorschach test.”

—Kara Walker