Kara Walker

Using the genteel technique of cut-paper silhouette popular in the nineteenth century, Kara Walker constructs provocative narratives of race and gender derived from Civil War era stereotypes and prejudices. The portfolio of 15 offset lithographs and screenprints she made at the Neiman Center in 2005 take as their matrix enlarged pages from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War published in 1866 and 1868. Walker then overlaid them with her own unsettling images rendered in black screenprint. She employed a variety of strategies to break in, coverup, or otherwise intervene in the narrative put forth by Harper’s, usurping the images' original dramatic purposes in favor of ones of her own invention. "These prints," Walker explained, "are the landscapes that I imagine exist in the back of my somewhat more austere wall pieces." 

Walker (b. 1969) received a BFA at the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and a MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Her work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad at institutions including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY,  The Hammer Museum, LA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Tate Modern, London and Tate Liverpool. She has been awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize and the prestigious MacArthur Award. Her work is included in several public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, Tate Modern, London, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center. Walker currently lives and works in New York.

Learn more about this artist:

Walker Art Center
Art21
MoMA