May

Kara Walker
(American, b. 1969, Stockton, CA. Lives and works in New York.)
Freedom: A Fable, 1997
artist's pop-up book, laser cut paper and text on paper, ed. 4000
Concept and images by Kara Walker; design by David Eisen
D2006.p16, Gift of the Peter and Eileen Norton Family

Kara Walker's work has become synonymous with the silhouette, a type of cut-paper portraiture that first became popular in Europe in the 1750s. Silhouette-like forms have been used throughout the entire history of art, since they produce images that are universally easy to identify. They are highly effective communication devices because they rely on major forms and shapes, and not on minute details or nuances of color
and form.

As the artist says, "The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does.
While the stereotype can communicate with a lot of people, the other side is that it reduces diversity to that stereotype." She has used silhouette-like images to produce works in a variety of media, including mural-scale wall pieces, film and video, prints and drawings, and even a pop-up book, seen here.

Walker's works have an undertone of sexual violence, and a scatological edge. Her combination of ambiguous interactions together with starkly graphic imagery has stuck raw nerves all around. Since her appearance on the scene in the 1990s, she has been praised for the boldness of her imagery, and at the same time criticized for its ambiguity. Regardless of our skin color, history, or personal views, Walker really presents us with the uncomfortable fact that what we call "slavery" is not only a historicized event, but a complex set of power struggles, still played out on stages large and small, private and public.

Critic Emily Hall wrote: "The conversation over Kara Walker's work has been more complicated. Her life-size cutout silhouettes of imagined slave narratives are full of acts that challenge the most enlightened sensibilities -- sodomy, pedophilia, severed limbs, scatological events. That these things are happening between antebellum slaves and their masters invokes a whole other set of reactions, not the least of which are guilt, discomfort, and loss. These images are dialectical: fact working against fiction, horror shot through with whimsy, beauty that is also blasphemous. To say they are barbed is a terrible understatement, but it is also inaccurate to say that they are unequivocal in their meaning. In fact, they can be quite ambiguous." (The Stranger, 2001). Walker's work evokes the concept of contre-jour (against daylight), where looking directly something in front of an intense light, our eyes can perceive it only in silhouette.

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