Kara Walker
Cuts black paper silhouettes of the antebellum South, and makes them unbearable to look at politely.
Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969 and moved to Georgia at thirteen, which she has described as her first real encounter with the American South. She works in cut-paper silhouette — a genteel nineteenth-century parlour craft — and uses it to stage scenes of slavery, violence and sexual brutality across whole gallery walls, so that the decorum of the medium and the content are permanently at war. A Subtlety, the enormous sugar-coated sphinx installed in the derelict Domino refinery in Brooklyn in 2014, brought the work to an audience far beyond the art world. She received a MacArthur fellowship at twenty-seven.
The wall installations are room-scale works composed of many individually cut paper elements, and they are sold as a defined set with an installation diagram; completeness and the diagram are essential, and a missing element cannot simply be recut. The paper is fragile and the adhesive method is specified. Unique works on paper in gouache, ink and collage are the practical market. Prints, including the large aquatint and screenprint portfolios, are well documented and are the accessible part of the output.
If you own a work by Kara Walker
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