Kara Walker
Testimony is a suite of five images that Walker captured and digitally manipulated from her 2004 video Testimony: Narrative of a Negress, Burdened by Good Fortune. Inspired by popular entertainments like shadow theatre and marionette shows, the artist manipulates her characters, mirroring the ways in which they have manipulated each other on a larger stage of labor economics, slavery racism, and patriarchal control. The images are printed as photogravures, a process developed in the 1850s, where photographs produce etched plates, from which rich, velvety prints are made. Walker's photogravure prints read like stills from early films, adding another multi-sided story to her meta-narrative, of blacks employed in early stage and cinematic entertainments, and of the manipulation of their images by those entertainments.
The text and the laser-cut, pop-up imagery of Walker's book Freedom: A Fable, form an historical narrative as told by an alter-ego she invented - the emancipated negress.
This work was produced during a watershed year for Walker, when at age 28 she gave birth to her first child, and also received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" Fellowship for her art. The pop-up format expanded her provocative imagery into three-dimensional space, while providing a space for fictive text. With it, Walker projects a unique voice.
Born in 1969 in Stockton, California, Kara Walker earned a BFA from Atlanta College of Art, 1991, and an MFA from the Rhode Island Institute of Design, 1994. Since then some scores of her installations and hundreds of drawings, prints and watercolors have been shown in more than forty solo exhibitions around the world. She took part in the 25th São Paulo Biennial (2002) and received the Deutsche Bank Prize in2004. Walker teaches at Columbia University, New York. |
