Kara Walker Exhibit Opens at the Whitney
If there is only one exhibition that catch this fall season, let it be the Whitney Museum’s fabulous new retrospective “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” which is on view through February 3. The show, which opened yesterday, features over 100 of Kara Walker (one of the grand divas of contemporary black visual art) classic works such as “Slavery! Slavery!” and the much heralded “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart.” 
Like many, i've always been fascinated with this artist's work. The visual vocabulary of Walker’s rich and haunting oeuvre draws from a violent repertoire of slave plantation archetypes and iconography: the Negress and the Mistress, the buck and the overseer, the mammy and the Belle, the Klansman and the runaway nigger.
As curator Annette Dixon has noted, within Walker’s (art) world “desire and miscegenation, sex and torture, violence and play intermingle thematically” in these ghostly scenes of seduction.
I’m thinking about reviewing the show, we’ll see if I have time.
Like many, i've always been fascinated with this artist's work. The visual vocabulary of Walker’s rich and haunting oeuvre draws from a violent repertoire of slave plantation archetypes and iconography: the Negress and the Mistress, the buck and the overseer, the mammy and the Belle, the Klansman and the runaway nigger.
As curator Annette Dixon has noted, within Walker’s (art) world “desire and miscegenation, sex and torture, violence and play intermingle thematically” in these ghostly scenes of seduction.
I’m thinking about reviewing the show, we’ll see if I have time.
I find Kara's works to be titalating in the most open sense and racially challenging, she is however a wonderful and very well spoke woman.
Posted by
Christopheraaron Deanes |
10/14/2007
I've really got to get my ass to NYC before this exhibit closes.
Posted by
jbrotherlove |
10/15/2007
the connection of her work sponsored by the Phillip Morris Co. (Altria) which was a major contributor to the slave markets & ongoing growth in cancer cases...I'll take the Harlem Studio Museum show where I saw her first; U go Ms Walker -make that money!
Posted by
Troy N. |
10/19/2007
i remember when i first saw her exhibit at the metropolitan museum of art. i was really taken back by her passion to shine the truth on black oppression and the values that both the white culture and the black culture intermingled but shared different views. one major aspect of her exhibits deal with violation of black women. white men dictate and black men seem to never appreciate..i just think she is really talented.
Posted by
goldencrust boy |
10/20/2007
"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.
Posted by
Anonymous |
10/23/2007