I am drawn to Kara Walker's work because of her ability to draw life size silhouettes with a knife and her use of the overhead projectors in her work. Walker is best known for her black paper silhouettes whose subject matter shows a complicated mixture of race, sex, and African slave history. Her provocative paper cutout images show an antique quality that reflects the plantation era of the south. Walker claims she found fuel for her subject matter from movies like “Gone with the Wind” and old historical novels about the south that both glorify and distort interracial sexual relationships.
In Walker's piece “Darkytown Rebellion” (2000), she creates a theatrical space in her show by using overhead projectors to throw color and light onto the ceiling, walls, and the floor around her life sized black silhouettes. She makes the audience participate in this piece by setting up ceiling projectors that cast the viewer's shadow onto the walls along side her silhouetted cutouts. The visual outcome becomes a mixture of historical prospective with the live silhouettes interacting with each other. I admire Walker's ability to make the public activate themselves with her pieces and thus helping to trigger their thoughts about the message content of the images.
Walker has exhibited her work at the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has received many fellowships and awards for her work and currently teaches at Columbia University in NYC.
“There’s a sweet violence in the act of cutting, of accepting and rejecting cultural stereotypes.” -Kara Walker
"Overhead projectors are a didactic tool, they’re a schoolroom tool. So they’re about conveying facts. The work that I do is about projecting fictions into those facts." -Kara Walker
"...I wanted to activate the space in a way and have these overhead projectors serve as a kind of stand-in for the viewer, as observers." -Kara Walker
“There’s an understanding within America about where that resolution is, you know, what that means to have a "Color Purple" scenario where things resolve in a way and a female heroine actualizes through a process of self-discovery and historical discovery and comes out from under her oppressors and maybe doesn’t become a hero, but is a hero for herself.”
