Kara Walker Biography

Kara Walker is an American installation artist who used intricate cut-paper silhouettes, together with collage, drawing, painting, performance, film, video, shadow puppetry, light projection, and animation, to comment on power, race, and gender relations.

Kara Walker Age

Her father, Larry Walker, was an artist and chair of the art department at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. She showed promise as an artist from a young age, but it was not until the family moved to Georgia when she was 13 that she began to focus on issues of race.

Kara Walker Education

Walker received a bachelor’s degree (1991) from the Atlanta College of Art and a master’s degree (1994) from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she began working in the silhouette form while exploring themes of slavery, violence, and sex found in sources such as books, films, and cartoons. Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994.

Walker found herself uncomfortable and afraid to address race within her art during her early college years. However, she found her voice on this topic while attending Rhode Island School of Design for her Master’s, where she began introducing race into her art. She had a distinct worry that having race as the nucleus of her content would be received as typical or obvious.

Kara Walker Married|Dating

Walker got married to Klaus Bürgel who is German-born jewelry professor in 1996. They had a daughter together in 1997. The couple separated and their divorce was finalized in 2010. As of now, Seems  Walker has found love again as she is in a relationship with photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos.

Ari Marcopoulos is an Amsterdam-born American photographer and filmmaker. He lives and works in New York and California. As a photographer, film artist and adventurist, Marcopoulos, transplants himself into the intimate lives of people living on the edge.

Kara Walker Net Worth

Walker has an estimated net worth of 3 million US dollars.

Kara Walker Art

In 1994 Walker’s work appeared in a new-talent show at the Drawing Center in New York. Her contribution was a 50-foot (15-metre) mural of life-size silhouettes depicting a set of disturbing scenes set in the antebellum American South. The piece was titled Gone, a Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Negress and Her Heart.

That work and subsequent others, such as a series of watercolors titled Negress Notes (Brown Follies) (1996–97), caused a stir. Some African American artists, particularly those who participated in the civil rights movement, deplored her use of racist caricatures. Walker made it clear that her intent as an artist was not to create pleasing images or to raise questions with easy answers. She also explained her use of the silhouette by stating that “the silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.”

Kara Walker Genius Grant

In 1997, at age 27, Walker received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” Her work was exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and she served as the U.S. representative to the 2002 São Paulo Biennial. She was also on the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York City.

In 2006 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City featured her exhibition titled After the Deluge, which was inspired in part by the devastation wreaked the previous year by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The exhibition juxtaposed pieces from the museum’s own collection—many of which depicted black figures or images demonstrating the terrific power of water—with some of her own works.

The intermingled disparate images created an amalgam of new meaning fraught with a discomfiting ambiguity characteristic of much of Walker’s output. Two subsequent major exhibitions were My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, a comprehensive traveling show organized in 2007 by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! (2013), for the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kara Walker Sugar Baby

Walker’s first sculptures were commissioned for a temporary installation in the former Domino Sugar processing facility in Brooklyn, New York, just before the building’s scheduled demolition in 2014. The work, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, featured a colossal 35-foot- (10.7-meter-) tall sugar-coated polystyrene female sphinx and a cortege of molasses-colored candy figurine boys hauling baskets and bananas.

With a kerchief knotted on her head and exaggerated nose and lips, the sphinx recalled the stereotypical “mammy” figure, while her bare breasts and provocative pose that exposed her genitalia suggested an obliging object of sexual desire. The engaging yet unsettling installation drew more than 130,000 visitors during its eight-weekend run.

Drawing from the work’s full title, 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, many critics lauded the piece for raising challenging questions on, among other complexities, slavery, racial stereotypes, and the female sexual object.

Kara Walker Influences

Her influences include Adrian Piper’s who played with her identity as a light-skinned black woman to flush racism out of hiding using political self-portraits which address ostracism, otherness, racial passing, and racism, Andy Warhol, and Robert Colescott, who inserted cartoonish Dixie sharecroppers into his version of Vincent Van Gogh’s Dutch peasant cottages.

Kara Walker Silhouettes

Walker is best known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery. She has also produced works in gouache, watercolor, video animation, shadow puppets, magic-lantern projections, as well as large-scale sculptural installations like her ambitious public exhibition with Creative Time called A Subtlety (2014).

The black and white silhouettes confront the realities of history, while also using the stereotypes from the era of slavery to relate to persistent modern-day concerns. Her exploration of American racism can be applied to other countries and cultures regarding relations between race and gender and reminds us of the power of art to defy conventions.