Kara Walker

Brent Sikkema, New York
Through October 13

Since Kara Walker’s arrival on the scene in the mid-1990s, her dramatic silhouette caricatures of slaves and masters in the antebellum American South have elicited both horror and praise.

Her critics argue that her work fuels racist and sexist fantasies. Her fans (including the MacArthur foundation, which awarded her a prestigious “Genius Grant” in 1997) laud her willingness to confront unsavory cultural myths.

In American Primitive, the artist’s trademark cut-paper characters continued to weave loose narratives that skew perceptions of dominance and submission, power and impotence, civility and barbarism: dualities historically manipulated to shape racial difference. This time she also combined her signature figures with other media.

In one gallery, overhead light projectors cast three different scenes on its walls. An abstracted landscape composed of paint-by-number-like color fields was projected over the clusters of nearly life-sized cut-out figures and severed body parts arranged in the foreground. One depicted a black man poking a human bone up his ass until it protruded from the other side, hanging down in place of his penis. Nearby, a Klansman offered his mutilated backside to a white woman wielding a bat. If the stark silhouettes represent stereotypes (however altered) from our cultural mythology, the background projections describe the fantasy world where they reside.

Featured in an adjoining gallery, were thirty-seven small Masonite boards, painted with simple, candy-colored scenes to which more figures were affixed. Walker’s ability to cast doubt on cherished presumptions is clear in Entrance to the Underground Railroad, showing a runaway slave descending into a dark, vagina-like hole in a field of velvety green grass. Here the Underground Railroad represents at once a return to the safety of the womb and an ominous pathway from the side where the grass may be greener.

Interspersed among the paintings were framed index cards with bits of typed text concerning race, gender, and artistic expression. Written in different styles from various perspectives—a letter to a fictional master, a poem to her critics, a speech to fellow black women—the words added a more serious, reverential tone to the perverse humor of Walker’s parodic imagery, and consequently make her intentions less ambiguous.

It is precisely this usual ambiguity, however, this ability to make viewers both laugh and recoil, that makes her images so effective.




Meredith Mendelsohn