Kara Walker

Kara Elizabeth Walker (born November 26, 1969) is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work.

She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes.

Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California.

Her father, Larry Walker, was a painter and professor.

Her mother Gwendolyn was an administrative assistant.

Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994.

Walker found herself uncomfortable and afraid to address race within her art during her early college years, worrying it would be received as "typical" or "obvious"; however, she began introducing race into her art while attending Rhode Island School of Design for her Master's.

Walker recalls reflecting on her father's 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."

Walker is best known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery.

She first came to the art world's attention 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 cut-paper silhouette mural, presenting an Antebellum south filled with sex and slavery, was an instant hit.

At the age of 28, she became the second youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant, second only to renowned Mayanist David Stuart.

Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award.

In her piece created in 2000, "Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On)", the silhouetted characters are against a background of colored light projections.

A 2007 review in the New York Times described her early life as calm, noting that "nothing about [Walker's] very early life would seem to have predestined her for this task. Born in 1969, she grew up in an integrated California suburb, part of a generation for whom the uplift and fervor of the civil rights movement and the want-it-now anger of Black Power were yesterday's news."

When Walker was 13, her father accepted a position at Georgia State University.

They settled in the city of Stone Mountain.

The move was a culture shock for the young artist.

In sharp contrast with the multi-cultural environment of coastal California, Stone Mountain still held Ku Klux Klan rallies.

At her new high school, Walker recalls, "I was called a 'nigger,' told I looked like a monkey, accused (I didn't know it was an accusation) of being a 'Yankee.'"

In 2007, the Walker Art Center exhibition "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love" was the artist's first full-scale US museum survey.

Her influences include Andy Warhol, whose art Walker says she admired as a child, Adrian Piper, and Robert Colescott.

Walker's silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African-American women in particular.

Walker uses images from historical textbooks to show how enslaved African Americans were depicted during Antebellum South.

The silhouette was typically a genteel tradition in American art history; it was often used for family portraits and book illustrations.

Walker carried on this portrait tradition but used them to create characters in a nightmarish world, a world that reveals the brutality of American racism and inequality.

Walker incorporates ominous, sharp fragments of the South's landscape, such as Spanish moss trees and a giant moon obscured by dramatic clouds.

These images surround the viewer and create a circular, claustrophobic space.

This circular format paid homage to another art form, the 360-degree historical painting known as the cyclorama.

Some of her images are grotesque; for example, in "The Battle of Atlanta," a white man, presumably a Southern soldier, is raping a black girl while her brother watches in shock; and a male black slave rains tears all over an adolescent white boy.

The use of physical stereotypes such as flatter profiles, bigger lips, straighter nose, and longer hair helps the viewer immediately distinguish the black subjects from the white subjects.

Walker depicts the inequalities and mistreatment of African Americans by their white counterparts.

Viewers at the Studio Museum in Harlem looked sickly, shocked, and appalled upon seeing her exhibition.

Thelma Golden, the museum's chief curator, said that "throughout her career, Walker has challenged and changed the way we look at and understand American history. Her work is provocative, emotionally wrenching, yet overwhelmingly beautiful and intellectually compelling."

Walker has said that her work addresses the way Americans look at racism with a "soft focus," avoiding "the confluence of disgust and desire and voluptuousness that are all wrapped up in [...] racism."

In an interview with New York's Museum of Modern Art, Walker stated: "I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things– genre paintings, historical paintings– the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society."

She has also produced works in gouache, watercolor, video animation, shadow puppets, "magic-lantern" projections, as well as large-scale sculptural installations like her ambitious public exhibition with Creative Time called "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).

The black and white silhouettes confront the realities of history while also using the stereotypes from the era of slavery to relate to persistent modern-day concerns.

She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.

Walker is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.