Kara Walker

Kara Walker – Racist hostility characterised her childhood

Kara Walker was born on 26 November 1969 in Stockton, California. She came into contact with the fine arts as a child through her father Larry Walker who was a painter: As a three-year-old, she would sit on his lap, watching him drawing, and decided she wanted to be an artist herself. Her father eventually took a position at the Georgia State University and moved the family to Stone Mountain, a suburb of Atlanta. For the 13-year-old Kara Walker, the new environment was a big culture shock, with the racist ideology of the Klu Klux Klan still rife in the Southern states, including blatant public rallies. She also faced hostility at her new high school due to her heritage. Despite this, she initially shied away from making the intense experiences of racism a subject of her artistic work, but during her course at the Rhode Island School of Design, she changed her stance and began to address the difficult subject. 

The horrors of history as a black silhouette

Kara Walker found an unusual means of expression for her art which soon made her world-famous: the silhouette. Her black silhouettes on white grounds fill whole walls and tell of the dark side of US American history with aesthetic refinement and provocative obscenities.  Her sometimes-drastic depictions show no regard for political correctness and thus often provoke sharp public controversy – not only among the majoritarian white society, but certainly also among African-American fellow artists who question some of Kara Walker’s artistic decisions. Kara Walker does not relativise the horrors of the past; her art does not aim for a diffuse reconciliation but seeks an enthralling discourse with the grievances of the present, which are often enough rooted in past injustice. Walker appreciates in the silhouette the possibility of expressing a great deal with very little information. At the same time, she is aware that she can never convey the whole picture with the silhouette, but only one side, at best half the truth. 

Work on paper is a fundamental element

As well as her world-famous silhouettes, Kara Walker dedicates herself time and again to drawing, the medium she learnt as a child sitting on her father’s lap. In her drawings, she mixes pictorial and textual elements, the meaning of which is not elaborated by the artist but is left to the interpretation of the viewer. Kara Walker also includes image and sound in her art projects and reacts to current events, for example the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina which hit the African-American slums of the southern metropolis particularly hard. However, the work on paper remains fundamental for the artist. Kara Walker has received prizes and honours for her art, and in 1997, at the age of 28, was the youngest artist to be awarded the MacArthur fellowship, whilst in 2007, the TImes listed her amongst the 100 most influential personalities in the world.