TheGrio's 100: Kara Walker, activism through art
TheGrio's 100 - Political protest through art has always been a way of life for Walker...
Slavery left an indelible mark on the American psyche, and African-Americans have many different ways of exploring this part of history. Artist Kara Walker explores the racial and sexual politics of the Antebellum South through her black cut-paper silhouettes. One of her best-known pieces is The Battle of Atlanta, a 400-foot painting which graphically depicts the literal and figurative rape of black females by white males during the Civil War.
“All of the bad vibes, the bad feelings, all of the nastiness, and all of the sort of vulgar associations with blackness, and the more base associations in this culture about Black Americans or Africans bubble up to the surface of my brain and spill out into this work,” said Walker in a 1999 interview with the Museum of Modern Art.
Political protest through art has always been a way of life for Walker, ever since her father, an artist, taught her to use her imagination growing up in California. Walker, now a faculty member at Columbia University graduate art program, uses images from historical textbooks to give audiences a better understanding of how slaves were depicted.
“Watching Kara draw is like it must have been to watch Picasso,” said Bruce W. Ferguson, former dean of Columbia’s School of the Arts in an interview. “She has an incredible blend of pure skill, talent and imagination, all of which make her a great artist and a great teacher.
In recent years, she has garnered many accolades, including becoming one of the youngest recipients of the 1997 MacArthur Fellowship at the age of 28, and being named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2007.
With any spotlighted social or political moment, it is the artists who set the tone. For Walker, Hurricane Katrina was her moment. Following the disaster in 2005, she created an exhibition called “Kara Walker at the Met: After the Deluge”, which compares the devastation in New Orleans to the Middle Passage, the ship route which brought enslaved Africans to the Americas.
When Katrina struck, Walker was in Los Angeles preparing for an exhibit. “I got to thinking about what role an artist should play in responding to and shaping the way such a story is told,” she said in a 2006 interview.
