Biography
Kara Walker (American, b. 1969) is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes that examine the underbelly of America's racial and gender tensions.
She is contemporary
African American who explores race, gender, sexuality and identity in her work.
She uses black cut paper silhouettes. She was born in Sockton California, her
mother worked as an administrative assistant. Her retired father is formally
educated artist and an administrator.
Kara Walker works are challenge to the traditional concepts
of race based on thinking and to narratives of enslavement and oppression. Her
art forces us to questions our understanding of power and how it manifests
itself with time space between people.
She has a nice picture, for example she has a drawing of a
couple dancing on a river and then in the corner of the picture has something
diabolic, like a little devil eating a bird or a dead man on the floor.
Technique
Kara Walker is perhaps best known for her cut-paper silhouettes.
She mentions being drawn to early American
silhouettes as she explored an interest in kitsch. For Walker, the simplified details of a human form in the black cut-outs seem
cartoonish, and resonate with racial stereotypes that are also reductions of actual human
beings.
To create a silhouette, Walker draws her images with a greasy
white pencil or soft pastel crayon on large pieces of black paper, which she
then cuts with an X-ACTO knife. As she composes her images, she thinks in
reverse, in a way, because she needs to flip the silhouettes over after she cuts
them. The images are then adhered to paper, canvas, wood, or directly to the
gallery wall with wax.
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