Kara Walker at the Whitney in NYC

by phoebems | October 12th, 2007

walkernyt.jpg

(Photo courtesy of the NY Times)

The NY Times has a review of the artist Kara Walker’s big exhibit at the Whitney Museum in NYC right now… She is a really great artist, and I encourage anyone in the area to check the exhibit out. I know I’ll be seeing it, come vacation time.

Kara Walker works in silhouettes that address issues such as race, slavery and the black American identity. Her work is really striking, beautiful and affecting.

I just want to put a plug in on this website, because it’s worth seeing!

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    Anyone else think the same? Got me thinking after reading this, thx man.
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    Have to say I do agree. Things like this just are what they are.
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    "I felt the work of Kara Walker was sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children; that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment."
    --Betye Saar, African American artist

    "What is troubling and complicates the matter is that Walker's words in published interviews mock African Americans and Africans...She has said things such as 'All black people in America want to be slaves a little bit.'...Walker consciously or unconsciously seems to be catering to the bestial fantasies about blacks created by white supremacy and racism."
    --Howardena Pindell, African American artist, at the Johannesburg Biennale, October 1997.

    All black people in America want to be slaves a little bit.
    --Kara Walker, as quoted by Jerry Saltz in a 1996 FlashArt piece

    Her blacks don't resist aggression, or at least not in obvious ways. They seem to give in to it, let themselves be abjectly used, often by one another.
    --2003 NYT article by Holland Carter

    Kara Walker is not presenting a heightened reality of American slavery. Blackness is a concept that Kara Walker objectively debases. These images are visualizations of what Toni Morrison describes as the white subconscious Playing in the Dark. As such, they are a reflection of the psychosis of white supremacy. However, it is not a full critique of this mindset and may in fact justify this mindset. It is my opinion that she rationalizes and projects in her work, the psychosis of the white male mindset, without the guilt, in fact with total acceptence.
 

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