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KARA WALKER |
Kara Walker’s black-and-white silhouettes of sex and violence set in the antebellum American South have been causing controversy since they were first exhibited in the mid-1990s. Appropriating the nineteenth-century, middle-class craft of the black paper cut-out, Walker makes images that seduce with their seeming simplicity and elegance and then shock with the disturbing and, to some, patently offensive stories they tell.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has acquired The Emancipation Approximation, a series of screen prints by Kara Walker that is based on a mural-sized installation of silhouette cut-outs first shown at the Carnegie International 1999/2000 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In this work, Walker’s cut-outs have been translated into elegant screen prints in black, white, and gray. White masters, black slaves, swans, and severed heads cavort through the twenty-six prints included in the series in a manner that suggests the unfolding of a visual story. The title of the piece is an ironic play on words referring to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 that abolished slavery in this country. Images alluding to the horrors of slavery in that era are joined with references to Greek mythology (Leda and the Swan) and the moralistic African-American folk tales of Uncle Remus (personified fox and rabbit) in a complex work that can perhaps be understood as a reflection on the elusiveness of freedom itself.
Walker’s "stories" are open-ended. Her shadowy black-and-white forms and figures function like Rorschach inkblots inasmuch as each viewer has to interpret them based on his or her own personality and prejudices. Tough and provocative, Kara Walker’s art elicits contemplation of issues from America’s past and the legacy of those issues.
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects