In the summer of 2014, New York-based American artist Kara Walker presented a massive installation of sugar-coated sculptures in the former home of the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The striking centerpiece, an all-white sugar sphinx, created in homage to the enduring cultural legacy of the Mammy figure—a Black woman in headwrap who was charged with the maintenance of white households and the rearing of white children—was in many ways a three-dimensional realization of the trenchant racial caricatures that have come to define Walker’s practice.
Perhaps most easily identified by large wall installations of silhouetted narratives, imagined scenarios that draw their inspiration from the history of American chattel slavery, slave narratives, minstrelsy, and racist kitsch, Walker has an incisive way of using simplistic visual language to mine one of the deepest and darkest wounds in American history. Walker presents these histories in a way that foregrounds the horror, spectacle, and, ultimately, the absurdity of anti-Black racism.
Walker’s silhouettes not only work to illuminate the racist political and social histories of the United States but also directly implicate specific cultural histories, including the perpetuation of racist stereotypes within literature, material histories, and the Western art historical canon. What may initially read to the eye as depictions of romantic love, allusions to Neoclassical statuary, and Victorian cameos, suddenly break down to reveal violent scenes of mutilation, rape, defecation, and abjection. Walker’s prolonged investment in American history works to remind us that history is largely told from the perspective of the victor and that we must all work harder to see the painful truths often hiding within plain sight.
Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014. Polystyrene foam, sugar, approx. 35.5 x 26 x 75.5 feet (10.8 x 7.9 x 23 m). Installation view: Domino Sugar Refinery, A project of Creative Time, Brooklyn, NY, 2014. Photo: Jason Wyche. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers
Kara Walker, A Subtlety (detail), 2014. Polystyrene foam, sugar, approx. 35.5 x 26 x 75.5 feet (10.8 x 7.9 x 23 m). Installation view: Domino Sugar Refinery, A project of Creative Time, Brooklyn, NY, 2014. Photo: Jason Wyche. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers
Kara Walker, A Subtlety (detail), 2014. Polystyrene foam, sugar, approx. 35.5 x 26 x 75.5 feet (10.8 x 7.9 x 23 m). Installation view: Domino Sugar Refinery, A project of Creative Time, Brooklyn, NY, 2014. Photo: Jason Wyche. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers
Kara Walker, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994. Cut paper on wall, approx. 156 x 600 inches (396.2 x 1524 cm). Installation view: Selections 1994, The Drawing Center, New York, 1994. Photo: Orcutt Photo. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers
Kara Walker, African/American, 1998. Linoleum cut, sheet: 46.25 x 60.5 inches (117.5 x 153.7 cm). Edition of 40. Publisher/Printer: Landfall Press, Inc., Chicago. © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers
Kara Walker, Mammyammy, 1995. Cut paper and oil on canvas, 8 x 8 inches (20.3 x 20.3 cm). © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers
Kara Walker, Exodus of Confederates From Atlanta from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005. Offset Lithography and Silkscreen, sheet: 39 x 53 inches (99.1 x 134.6 cm). Edition of 35. Publisher/Printer: LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University, New York © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers
Kara Walker, Fons Americanus, 2019. Non-toxic acrylic and cement composite, recyclable cork, wood, and metal, main: 73.5 x 50 x 43 feet (22.4 x 15.2 x 13.2 meters), grotto: 10.2 x 10.5 x 10.8 feet (3.1 x 3.2 x 3.3 meters). Installation view: Hyundai Commission – Kara Walker: Fons Americanus, Tate Modern, London, 2019. Photo: Tate photography (Matt Greenwood). Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers
Imagen de portada: Kara Walker, Christ’s Entry into Journalism, 2017. Sumi ink and collage on paper, 140 x 196 inches (355.6 x 497.8 cm) © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers