Kara Walker
By: Erika Camilli
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
Why use projections?
“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 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?
Bibliography
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(n.d.). Retrieved September 18, 2009, from
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/walker/clip1.html#
(n.d.). Retrieved September 22, 2009, from
http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker
(n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2009, from
http://www.whitney.org/www/exhibition/kara_walker/links.
html
(n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2009, from
http://aim.search.aol.com/search/image?query=kara+walker&
page=9&s_cs=-9072155615768088496&s_dc=20
• (n.d.). Retrieved September 30, 2009, from
http://eastcoastwestcoastart.wetpaint.com/page/Kara+Wa
lker