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Kara Walker

Kara Walker

Kara Walker

Kara Walker

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Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, and university professor, who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. Walker is most well known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes that interrogate romantic narratives of the antebellum South of the United States. She is

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"When I started investigating my relationship to my identity and what my identity means, it was in the context of artists doing identity-based art. I envy and have a love for people who research in great detail history or some moment in history (say, feminist history), and then present it in a way that’s somewhat didactic and matter-of-fact—and, really, with an effort, a sincere effort to throw meaning out to an audience that, maybe, isn’t conscious of this aspect of history. But I’m incredibly suspicious of that impulse, too. I think that it’s all going to be filtered through one’s subjectivity. And my subjectivity—as a young person, as a person at the end of the twentieth century—my subjectivity is of a sexual woman, as a person who makes sometimes really bad decisions. There was no nobility in trying to do research like that, and in trying to filter my sense of self through the lens of a larger history. It was going to get complicated, and I liked the complications that I was finding. "Kara Walker Projecting Fictions: Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On" in Art21 (interview originally published on PBS in September 2003, and later republished by Art21 in November 2011)"
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