In her exhibits, Walker uses panoramic rooms filled with detailed black silhouette cut-outs. You can see the terrifying expression of a person’s face or the blades of hair in the slave master’s beard. After Hurricane Katrina, Walker created “After the Deluge”, which compared Katrina victims to victims of the Middle Passage. Walker’s other works include “Darkytown Rebellion”, “Slavery Slavery” and “Elegy for a No-Account Niggra.”
The Detroit Institute of Art removed Walker’s “A Means to an End: A Shadow Drama in Five Acts from the Where the Girls Are: Prints by Women” from the DIA’s Collection exhibition after a crowd of blacks protested against the piece.
Kara Walker is currently working as a professor of visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University. Her work has been seen all over the world: The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
(Photo: AP)
Little Known Black History Fact: Kara Walker was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
