Kara Walker’s work astutely examines race, gender, and identity. Walker’s newest series of large-scale drawings stem from her consideration of monuments and notions of permanence and impermanence following her massive public art project, A Subtlety, in Brooklyn. Influenced in part by the artist’s recent residency at the American Academy in Rome, this series of drawings is an extensive examination of how Walker envisions the rise and fall of society. Richly illustrated, this publication includes plates of each drawing, as well as intimate photographs of the artist at work taken by her partner, acclaimed artist and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos. An introduction by Reto Thüring and Beau Rutland contextualizes the importance of this latest evolution within Walker’s oeuvre; John Lansdowne addresses the topic of Christian iconography and its relationship to Walker’s new drawings; and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith contributes a new poem. In addition, a text by Walker considers her work within the recent political climate.

The Ecstasy of St. Kara: Kara Walker, New Work

Arts & Photography

Walker, Kara

Smith, Tracy K.

Thüring, Reto

Rutland, Beau

Lansdowne, John

History & Criticism

The Cleveland Museum of Art

Since she first came to the attention of the art world nearly ten years ago, Kara Walker has become one of the most important artists of her generation. Championed by the art world for her fearless embrace of challenging subject matter, Walker has created a body of work that looks unflinchingly at racial inequality in the United States. Known for her bold images using the traditional silhouette, Walker upends the genteel, Victorian origins of the medium by graphically portraying scenes from the antebellum South to explore the politics of slavery, race, and gender. Inspired by the tragedy that beset the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, Walker has created a volume exploring the interconnectedness of the subject of the sea, race, and poverty by juxtaposing examples of her work and historical works from the 19th century. This unique and important book capitalizes on Walker’s deftness at graphic and visceral storytelling, affording the reader a deeply intimate experience of the difficult themes the artist explores.

Kara Walker: After the Deluge

Rizzoli

During the late 1960s and 70s, a paradigm shift occurred within visual culture: photography and the moving image were absorbed into critical art practices. In particular, these mediums were used to record ephemeral or performative events and to render visible conceptual systems or to question the supposed objectivity of representation itself. This volume focuses primarily on artworks from the last decade and proposes that the extensive use of reproducible mediums in today's art has its roots in an earlier formative period. By the end of the 70s, many artists turned to photography as a vehicle through which to critique photographic representation and to subvert an art system premised on the notion of the original. While this practice came to define much of the 80s postmodern art, its legacy for the 90s was essentially the license to indulge in photographic fantasy, image construction, and cinematic narrative. Artists working today freely manipulate their representations of the empirical world or invent entirely new cosmologies. They process their subject matter through conceptual systems or use digital processes to alter their images. Some directly intervene in the environment, subtly shifting components of the found world and establishing their quiet presence in it; others fabricate entire architectural environments for the camera lens. This current state of the arts and its recent history are represented via more than 150 works by 55 artists, including Nam June Paik, Kara Walker, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Fischli &amp; Weiss, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Candida H fer, Thomas Ruff, J rge Sasse, Thomas Struth, Olafur Eliasson, Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Matthew Barney, Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell, Sam Taylor-Wood, Oliver Boberg, James Casebere, Thomas Demand, Vanessa Beecroft, Wolfgang Tillmans, Patty Chang, Trisha Donnelly, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, William Kentridge, Steve McQueen, Shirin Neshat, John Pilson and Gillian Wearing.

Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Collection

Abramovic, Marina

Nauman, Bruce

Acconci, Vito

GURSKY, ANDREAS

Gonzalez-Torres, Felix

Hanhardt, John G.

Smithson, Robert

BARNEY, Matthew

Paik, Nam June

Young, Joan

Villaseñor, Maria-Christina

Guggenheim Museum

Walker's silhouette images and drawings confront America's legacy of racial exploitation with unflinching clarity. Depicting acts of psychosexual violence in the antebellum south and revealing the depth of hatred behind racial stereotypes, her art uses history as a foil to create unforgettable images born from our collectively repressed psyche. Based on one of Walker's working notebooks, this publication is a privileged glimpse into the artist's mind. The splendidly designed book expands exponentially beyond Walker's well-recognized aesthetic of silhouettes to include watercolor drawings, photocopies and the threatening violence of the inspired tirade clumsily rendered on an antiquated typewriter. The copious number of writings offer artist's statements, fictional sketches, psychotic rants, vignettes and poesy in a wonderfully convoluted and fragmentary collection of little events as complicated as our nations historical memory. The book also features lush installation views of her sil

Kara Walker: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, January 12-February 23, 1997

Distributed Art Pub Inc

Disputes over free expression in the arts have always loomed as struggles between creativity and repression, transgression and outrage, candor and hypocrisy. But while high-profile shootouts at art museums and less visible skirmishes at schools, libraries, and theaters persist, overt censorship is no longer the only, or the most dire, threat to free expression. On the one hand, society has become more accepting of provocative imagery, with media conglomerates often leading the way in the depreciation of taboos. On the other hand, artists, while enjoying some unprecedented liberties, are hemmed in by new constraints that often fall beyond the range of First Amendment protection. The current terrain bears little resemblance to the culture wars of a decade ago, much less to what the First Amendment's Framers could have imagined. And since Sept. 11, 2001, the frontlines of the free-expression debate have been shifting once again. Based on a Columbia University conference organized by the National Arts Journalism Program, The New Gatekeepers explores the reconfigured ranks of those who decide what the public gets to see, hear and read, from struggles over intellectual property and copyright, to continuing debates about acceptable and offensive content in the cultural marketplace, to the less visible biases of the arts funding system. This heavily illustrated book also includes a historical overview of censorship and contributions by 40 scholars, artists, experts and journalists from around the United States. Discussed and participating artists include Edouard Manet, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Serra, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andres Serrano, Carolee Schneemann, Dread Scott, Gran Fury, Joel-Peter Witkin, Kara Walker, Jock Sturges, Chris Ofili, and Tom Sachs.

The New Gatekeepers: Emerging Challenges to Free Expression in the Arts

Menand, Louis

Manet, Édouard

Schneemann, Carolee

Mann, Charles

HIRST, Damien

Newman, Roger

SERRA, Richard

Chapman, Jake

Brenson, Michael

Koons, Jeff

Becker, Carol

Sunstein, Cass

Ofili, Chris

RODIN, Auguste

Sachs, Tom

Adler, Amy

Cahill, Timothy

Gurstein, Rochelle

Tepper, Steven

Godfrey, Marian

Chapman, Dinos

Ferguson, Laura

Scott, Dread

Serrano, Andres

National Arts Journalism Program

This radical new study aims to change the way that some of the most influential artists of the past 40 years are seen--all of them women. Emphasizing questions of autonomy, critical intelligence and artistic intention, Witness to Her Art presents works by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and Eau de Cologne, a magazine published by gallerist Monika Spruth. The artworks are accompanied by original writings by the artists, contemporaneous criticism and newly commissioned essays by Pamela Franks, Aruna D'Souza, Johanna Burton, David Levi Strauss, Hamza Walker and Cuauhtemoc Medina. The ambitious works presented and interpreted herein invite us to consider the impact of the feminist revolution across generations while rendering obsolete any stigma associated with shows or catalogues limited to women artists. Taking its lead from Conceptualism, feminism, and from its included artists, Witness to Her Art reaches for art history's capacity as a medium of world-making.

Witness to Her Art

Rossell, Daniela

Bard College

What from far may seem a charming fairytale illustration or a blown-up version of the 18th-century silhouette, is in fact much darker and deeper. Kara Walker's oeuvre of black cut-paper silhouette wallworks creates vivid and shocking evocations, rooted in the most egregious stereotypes, of an antebellum world that comments on the system of slavery and its continuing legacy in the American consciousness. Arguably the most controversial young African-American artist working today, Walker explores issues of personal identity, racism, and social injustice, forcing the viewer to confront stereotypes that are often ignored, confirmed anew, and reinforced. This volume includes a selection of her silhouette works--on both black and grey walls, and with light projections--and drawings. Essays by Edna Moshenson and Marion Ackermann. Foreword by Dr. Ariane Grigoteit and Friedhelm Hütte.  Hardcover, 8.5 x 11.75 in.,59 color, 9 b/w illustrations

Kara Walker: Deutsche Bank Collection

As elements of our life move closer to art, and as art moves directly into life, the differences between the artificial and real are becoming progressively blurred. Form Follows Fiction focuses on a generation of artists who can no longer follow the modernist dictum "form follows function"; as our model of reality becomes more layered and less concrete, that decree morphs inevitably into "form follows fiction." Some of these artists create structures that intersect with everyday life, while others construct elaborate fictional systems that fuse elements of reality and fantasy. Some fashion elaborate invented worlds where past, present, and future are collapsed into one and where art historical icons and the debris of contemporary pop culture have equal relevance. All have developed new models of contemporary reality that are as fictional as they are real. Form Follows Fiction was conceived as a sequel to the 1992 exhibition Post Human, also curated by Jeffrey Deitch, which explored a new model of the human condition, pushing deep into the confusion between the artificial and the real.

Form Follows Fiction

Eliasson, Olafur

Aitken, Doug

Ritchie, Matthew

Murakami, Takashi

Ackermann, Franz

Orozco, Gabriel

Mori, Mariko

Currin, John

Guo-Qiang, Cai

Beecroft, Vanessa

Noble, Tim

Webster, Sue

Khedoori, Toba

Laurette, Matthieu

Kauper, Kurt

Manzelli, Margherita

Rist, Pipilotti

Gianelli, Ida

Charta

After the success of the recent touring exhibition My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Kara Walker's silhouetted cut-out figures are a now-familiar but still pungent presence in contemporary art, reenacting uncomfortable, often violent episodes in American race relations and reprising, in their formal simplicity, the ways in which marginalized identities are reduced and distorted into readily legible, caricatured forms. Walker's art continues, in other words, to pose awkward questions straightforwardly. Her imagery derives from the visual language of the antebellum South and the tradition of the minstrel show, which she directs to more disquieting ends. Where her source material parodied African-American culture with a terrifyingly casual jocularity--permitting white Americans to vicariously transgress their own taboos by depicting social chaos and unbridled sexuality--Walker applies that jocularity to her depictions of violence against African-Americans, lending them a hollow, almost slapstick character that is very much at odds with their original function. This latest book features work from a new series that addresses, among other themes, the atrocities committed against former slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Reconstruction program implemented by Congress between 1866 and 1877. These narratives are elaborated into or against geometric scenarios more abstract and compacted than previous sequences by Walker, and with a more extensive use of color.

Kara Walker: Bureau of Refugees

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