Kara Walker facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Kara Walker
|
|
|---|---|
.jpg)
Walker in 2013
|
|
| Born | November 26, 1969 |
| Education |
|
|
Notable work
|
Darkytown Rebellion, no place (like home), A Subtlety |
| Awards | MacArthur fellowship |
Kara Elizabeth Walker is a famous American artist born on November 26, 1969. She creates art that makes people think about important topics like race, gender, and identity.
Walker is most famous for her large art pieces made from black paper cutouts, called silhouettes. These often fill entire rooms. When she was only 28, she won a special award called the MacArthur fellowship, which is given to very talented people. She also teaches art at Rutgers University. Many people think she is one of the most important Black American artists working today.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Kara Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California. Her father, Larry Walker, was a painter and a professor. When Kara was 13, her family moved to Stone Mountain, Georgia. This was a big change for her. California was very diverse, but Stone Mountain still had Ku Klux Klan rallies, which made her feel uncomfortable.
Walker earned her first art degree from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991. She then got her Master's degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. At first, she was nervous to make art about race. But during her Master's program, she started to include these themes in her work.
Walker remembers being inspired by her father. She said, "One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad's lap in his studio... 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."
Artworks and Career
Walker is best known for her huge art pieces made from cut-paper silhouettes. These are usually black figures placed against a white wall. Her art often explores the history of American slavery and racism. She uses strong and sometimes unsettling images to do this.
She also creates art using paint, video, shadow puppets, and large sculptures. One famous sculpture was "A Subtlety" (2014), a giant sugar sphinx. Her black-and-white silhouettes show real historical events. They also use old stereotypes from the time of slavery to connect with problems we still face today.
Walker first became famous in the art world in 1994 with her mural "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart." This silhouette mural was very popular. The title of the artwork refers to the famous novel Gone with the Wind. The figures in the artwork also remind people of Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s.
At 28, she won the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant. This made her one of the youngest people ever to receive this award. In 2007, the Walker Art Center held a big exhibition of her work called "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love."
Walker's art is influenced by artists like Andy Warhol, Adrian Piper, and Robert Colescott.
Her silhouette images often show stories from the Antebellum South (the time before the American Civil War). They bring up issues of identity and gender, especially for African-American women. Walker uses images from old history books to show how enslaved African Americans were shown back then. Silhouettes were usually a polite art form used for family portraits. But Walker uses them to create characters in a nightmare world. This world shows the harsh reality of American racism and inequality.
Walker often includes dark parts of the Southern landscape in her art. These include Spanish moss trees and a large moon hidden by clouds. These images surround the viewer, creating a tight, circular space. This circular shape is a nod to an old art form called the cyclorama, which was a 360-degree historical painting.
In an interview, Walker said she liked pictures that told stories. She wanted to make art that showed historical events and everyday life.
How She Creates Her Art
Walker is known for her large art installations that fill a space. She often mixes different art forms, like visual art and performance art. Her installations use theatrical settings and life-size cutouts, which make them feel like a play. Walker focuses more on the ideas behind her art than just how it looks.
Her art is also like old panoramas, which were popular in the 1800s. Panoramas were used for entertainment and showed historical scenes or big landscapes. Walker's work shows that the feelings from panoramas still matter in African American art. They also show how the effects of slavery and racism still shape our culture today.
Kara Walker once said her art process is "two parts research and one part paranoid hysteria." This means she combines careful study of history with a feeling of fear or unease. Even with all the research, her art still has a sense of discomfort and complexity.
Famous Artworks
In 2000, Walker created "Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On)." In this piece, her silhouette characters are shown against a background of colored light. This makes the art look see-through, like old animated films. It also refers to the movie "Gone With the Wind." Light projectors were set up so that viewers' shadows were cast on the wall. This made them part of the art and encouraged them to think about the difficult themes.
In 2005, she created "8 Possible Beginnings" or: "The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture." This exhibit used moving images and sound to draw viewers into her dark worlds. The silhouettes were used as shadow puppets. She also used her own voice and her daughter's voice. This showed how the history of slavery in America has affected her as an artist and a Black woman.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Walker created "After the Deluge." The hurricane badly damaged many poor and Black areas of New Orleans. Walker saw news images of the victims and compared them to enslaved Africans packed onto ships during the Middle Passage (the journey across the Atlantic to America).
In 2018, Walker created "Katastwóf Karavan" for an art festival in New Orleans. This sculpture was an old-fashioned wagon. It had Walker's famous silhouettes of slaveholders and enslaved people on its sides. It also had a special steam-powered calliope (a musical instrument) that played songs about Black protest and celebration.
Even though Walker's art has deep meanings, she often uses "humor and viewer interaction." She has said, "I didn't want a completely passive viewer." She wanted to make art where the viewer would "either giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful."
Special Art Projects
In 2002, Walker created "An Abbreviated Emancipation" for The University of Michigan Museum of Art. This artwork showed ideas about race relations and their roots in slavery before the Civil War.
Her most famous special project was in May 2014. It was her first sculpture, a huge public artwork called "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby." This massive artwork was placed in the old Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York. The main part was a giant female sphinx figure, about 75 feet long and 35 feet high. It looked like the "Mammy" stereotype. It was made by covering a core with 80 tons of white sugar. There were also fifteen life-size male figures, called attendants, made from sugar or resin coated in molasses. The factory and the artwork were taken down after the exhibition ended in July 2014.
Walker said the whiteness of the sugar showed its "clean, and pure quality." The sculpture also highlighted the slave trade. The artwork attracted over 130,000 visitors.
In 2019, Walker created "Fons Americanus" for the Tate Modern in London. This fountain, which was about 13 feet tall, had symbols that referred to the histories of Africa, America, and Europe. It especially focused on the Atlantic slave trade. The artwork is also a public monument, partly inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace.
In 2023, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) asked Walker to create a special artwork for its Roberts Family Gallery.
Other Projects
In 1998, Walker designed a huge picture for the Vienna State Opera. In 2010, she created free lesson plans for K-12 teachers at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She suggested a lesson where students would work together on a story by sending text messages.
In 2013, Walker made 16 lithographs for a special edition of the opera Porgy & Bess.
Exhibitions
Walker's first big museum show was in 2007. It started at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then traveled to other museums, including the Whitney Museum in New York.
Solo Exhibitions
- 2007: "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" - Walker Art Center
- 2013: "Kara Walker, Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!" - The Art Institute of Chicago
- 2014: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby..." - Creative Time, Brooklyn, NY.
- 2019: Untitled – Hyundai Commission, Tate Modern.
- 2021: "A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be" - Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
Collections
Many public art collections own works by Kara Walker. These include the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Tate Collection in London, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Awards and Recognition
In 1997, Kara Walker was one of the youngest people to receive a MacArthur fellowship. She was the United States representative for a big art show in Brazil in 2002.
Walker also won the Deutsche Bank Prize in 2004 and the Larry Aldrich Award in 2005. In 2007, Time magazine listed her as one of the 100 Most Influential People in The World. In 2012, she was chosen to be part of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 2017, a large mural portrait of Kara Walker by artist Chuck Close was put up in a New York City subway station. In 2019, she was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Personal Life
Kara Walker married Klaus Bürgel in 1996 and had a daughter in 1997. They later divorced in 2010. As of 2017, she is in a relationship with photographer Ari Marcopoulos.
Walker moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn in 2003. She has been a professor of visual arts at Columbia University since then. She also has an art studio in Industry City and a country home in Massachusetts.
See also
In Spanish: Kara Walker para niños
