Kara Walker works across installation, film, painting, puppetry, sculpture, and printmaking to explore American history through race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity.
Read MoreKnown for her panoramas of cut-out silhouettes, Walker first gained recognition in 1994, Where t_e, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart_, presenting her signature cut-outs in the midst of sexual and violent scenarios. She has since transferred her use of silhouettes—a traditionally genteel, Victorian medium—across animation, shadow puppetry, and sculptural installations.
A Subtlety: Or... the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant (2014) is a public project commissioned by Creative Time at the Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn. The work comprises a female sphinx made from blocks of EPS foam covered in white sugar and measuring 75 feet long and 35 feet high, and it is positioned with 13 life-sized young male figures that were cast from boiled sugar and modelled after racist figurines that the artist found online.
Kara Walker's art frequently involves subject matter that is graphic and overwhelming. In 1999, the Detroit Institute of Arts removed _A Means to an End: A Shadow Drama in Five Acts _(1995) from the exhibition Where the Girls Are: Prints by Women from the DIA's Collection after its presence was deemed too controversial by the museum's administration and advisory group the Friends of African and African American Art.
__
Walker's 2019 Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, _Fons Americanu_s (2019) is a 13-metre-tall fountain that explores the histories of Africa, America, and Europe, with water representing power and recalling the transatlantic slave trade. The fountain's structure references the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace. Walker said the work was 'about power . . . and the ways power has been unequally distributive, the imposition of race, for instance, determining the fates of peoples'.
