“I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would either giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful. I wanted to create something that looks like you. It looks like a cartoon character, it’s a shadow, it’s a piece of paper, but it’s out of scale. It refers to your shadow, to some extent to purity, to the mirror.”
- Kara Walker -
Just walking into the Kara Walker show at The Whitney Museum of NY, “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love”, the first US museum show of the artist, it is easily evident how completely the artist achieved her purpose. Moving through the black and white decorated walls of the exhibition, where black paper silhouettes over white walls tell stories, relationships, life, feelings, powers and weaknesses of a cruel past unbelievably relevant today, it makes standing at such powerful discernments as passive viewers impossible. Those attractive silhouettes in fact, delicate and charming protagonists of the exhibition, attract the viewer by recalling old fairy tales’ illustrations. But, getting closer and closer, those tricky shadows lose their innocent appearance and become alive, revealing a shocking truth.
Incest, oppression, secrets, paradoxes, hierarchies, races, African American slaves and white American owners are the ingredients of such subtle but open dialogue, a two-way dialogue, firstly between Kara Walker and her living silhouettes and again between those silhouettes and the viewers, a dialogue each time so diverse, so intimate, so personal.
The artist’s choice of black paper-cut silhouettes on white surfaces represents her intention of free access and open interaction with her work. Black color for black slaves and black color for white owners, black for oppressors and black for the oppressed. The black homogeneity reflects, in this sense, a deep and profound, dark and hidden equality. There are slaves and there are owners of course, and everyone is well distinguishable for clear details, traits and lineaments, clothes and shoes; there are also race issues and hierarchy rules, but the Kara Walker show is far away from antiracism politicking, it is distant from piety or anger for black slaves’ condition. There are new feelings in these works, revolting feelings that nobody had ever told of previously: there is active desire instead of passive assault, there is attraction instead of scorn, there is weakness for the oppressors and power for the oppressed, there is a true upheaval of the popular knowledge of race and slavery’s issues.
Particularly impressive resound the black words over the white surface, black feelings over white behavior, in “Letter from a Black Girl (1998)”, a wall-size communique addressed ”Dear you hypocritical fucking twerp”, a pure uncolored voice telling unspeakable secrets, an unworried voice summarizing the whole exhibition, a voice which reflects though the silhouettes’ hearts, the paper-cut’s feelings.
The Kara Walker: “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” show in NY represents an impressive proof of the indistinguishable artist’s value, a proof of her diverse approach to art, art as voice of untold conditions, art as escape from conventions.
Kara Walker Biography
Born in Stockton, California, Walker moved to the South at age 13 when her father, artist Larry Walker, accepted a position at Georgia State University and her family relocated to Stone Mountain, a suburb of Atlanta. Focusing on painting and printmaking in college, she received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Walker was included in the 1997 Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Later that year, at the age of 27, she became the youngest recipient of the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant, which launched a public controversy around her work. In 2002 she was chosen to represent the United States in the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in the collections of major museums worldwide. The 2007 Walker Art Center–organized exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love is the artist's first full-scale U.S. museum survey. Walker currently lives in New York, where she is a professor of visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University
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