Walker Art Center Opens Retrospective

Known as one of the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation, Kara Walker has gained national and international recognition for her room-size tableaux depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation. “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” opening at the Walker Art Center on February 17, 2007 and showing through May 13, 2007, brings these themes together in the first full-scale American museum survey of Walker’s work. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition features works ranging from her signature black-paper silhouettes to film animations to more than one hundred works on paper.

Over the years Walker has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression, and liberation. Set in the American South before the Civil War, Walker’s compositions play off stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters and mistresses, slave men, women, and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. These scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery.

Walker’s visual epics systematically and critically walk a line—the “color line,” to quote W.E.B. Du Bois—that moves us from the antebellum South to an analysis of the sustaining economic, social, and individual power structures still in place today. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, she examines the dialectic of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. She has said, “The black subject in the present tense is the container for specific pathologies from the past and it is continuously growing and feeding off those maladies.” Organized deliberately as a narrative, this exhibition articulates the parallel shifts in Walker’s visual language and subject matter: from a critical analysis of the history of slavery as a microcosm of American history through the structure of romantic literature and Hollywood film to a revised history of western modernity and its relationship to the notion of “Primitivism.”

A series of lectures, gallery dialogues, and interactive, art-making activities will accompany the exhibition to give visitors an opportunity to respond to the work. On Thursday, March 29, at 7:30 p.m. in the Walker Cinema, historian Kevin Gaines will present a lecture on U.S. history and its relationship to stereotypes and blackness. Gaines is a professor of history and the director of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan with research interests that include minstrelsy, postwar U.S. history, transnational black radicalism, and jazz. This event is free and open to the public. Free tickets are available at the Walker’s Bazinet Garden Lobby desk starting at 6:00 p.m. that evening; a block of tickets has been reserved for OAH attendees. For more information call 612-375-7600 or visit <http://walkerart.org> and <http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker>.

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Sarah Peters is the Assistant Director, Public Programs at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.