Kara Walker valuation
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.
What a work by Kara Walker is worth
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Bio
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.
Fons Americanus, and Harper's Pictorial History
For the Hyundai Commission in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2019 she made Fons Americanus, a fountain thirteen metres high modelled on the Victoria Memorial on the Mall, which tells the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the African diaspora in the form of an imperial monument.
Her best-known print project, Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), from 2005, is a portfolio of fifteen large prints that enlarge illustrations from an 1866 anthology of reporting on the war and lay her silhouette figures over them. Sheets from it are often sold singly, and each should be described by its title and place in the portfolio, with its edition number.
Gone, Insurrection! and the Basel drawings
Walker's father, the painter Larry Walker, took a post at Georgia State University when she was thirteen. She took her BFA at the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994, the year her cut-paper mural Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart made her name. The circular hang of the big silhouette rooms borrows from the nineteenth-century cyclorama. In Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On), of 2000, coloured light projections throw the visitors' own shadows onto the wall among the figures.
8 Possible Beginnings, of 2005, brought in film and sound, with the silhouettes used as shadow puppets. Her first full American museum survey, My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love, opened at the Walker Art Center in 2007, and the Kunstmuseum Basel showed her drawings and archive in 2021. She names Andy Warhol, Adrian Piper and Robert Colescott among her influences, and has held the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers since 2015.
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