Black & White --find mystery about Kara Walker

                

 “One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad’s lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: ‘I want to do that, too,’ and I pretty much decided then and there at age 2½ or 3 that I was an artist just like Dad.” —Kara Walker
This is Kara Walker, not a special people with a special talent about art. Here she is, you want to know more about her? Go with me
Born November 26, 1969 in Stockton, CA
Lives and works in New York
EDUCATION
M.F.A. - Rhode Island School of Design, June, 1994 Painting/Printmaking.
B.F.A. - Atlanta College of Art, May, 1991 Painting/Printmaking
Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. She received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. The artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery, creating a theatrical space in which her unruly cut-paper characters fornicate and inflict violence on one another. In recent works like “Darkytown Rebellion” (2000), the artist uses overhead projectors to throw colored light onto the ceiling, walls, and floor of the exhibition space. When the viewer walks into the installation, his or her body casts a shadow onto the walls where it mingles with Walker’s black-paper figures and landscapes. With one foot in the historical realism of slavery and the other in the fantastical space of the romance novel, Walker’s nightmarish fictions simultaneously seduce and implicate the audience. Walker’s work has been exhibited 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. A 1997 recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award, Walker was the United States representative to the 2002 São Paolo Bienal in Brazil. Walker currently lives in New York where she is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University. 





I like Kara Walker since I saw her introduction video in the class. I like the way she showed art. Art is the thing which designed for the person who like. There's only black and white showed in her works seemed to say that you can enjoy it and read a lot true stories about slavery from the art if you were willing to use your imagines. On the contrast, you can only see shadow if you read them as black and white. It is said that black and white are the most beautiful colors in the world because all the colors combined of the black and the most pure white is not allowed to be polluted by lies. This is the first I went to see a show about art in my life, and I was really shocked about Kara's talents. .I went into the gallery, and was appealed by the attracted sounds from the inside room. Then I walked into the room to enjoy the video on the big screen. Actually, it was the shadowgraph on the show.I went to the LEHMANN MAUPIN gallery to see her show.

Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale is a shadow puppet narrative following the trials and tribulations of a southern protagonist, Miss Pipi. Walker conceived of the work during a trip through the Mississippi Delta, which, according to the artist is:
a region mythologized in song and popular culture but tragically depressing. I drove down to the Delta thinking about the terrors of Jim Crow and slavery, yet the silent indifference of the landscape and the economic stasis, lack of mobility, and the persistence of a racist memory in the area was what stuck.
Kara Walker was also showed in the New York Times.


Here's the video.

it’s all about artist thoughts of what she did in art. No special purpose but only what she felt .

“I knew that if I was going to make work that had to deal with race issues, they were going to be full of contradictions. Because I always felt that it's really a love affair that we've got going in this country, a love affair with the idea of it [race issues], with the notion of major conflict that needs to be overcome and maybe a fear of what happens when that thing is overcome— And, of course, these issues also translate into [the] very personal: Who am I beyond this skin I'm in?” 

“Blackness became a very loaded subject, a very loaded thing to be—all about forbidden passions and desires, and all about a history that’s still living, very present…the shame of the South and the shame of the South’s past; its legacy and its contemporary troubles." 

“I'm not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about.” 

“I’m reducing things down a lot, but I’m also characterizing everything and everyone as a black thing, and it comes from a way of viewing the world, looking for blackness, in its good and nefarious forms.” 

There is a really great background makes she think of doing the art about the slavery.African Americans had been enslaved in what became the United States since early in the 17th century. Even so, by the time of the American Revolution and eventual adoption of the new Constitution in 1787, slavery was actually a dying institution. As part of the compromises that allowed the Constitution to be written and adopted, the founders agreed to end the importation of slaves into the United States by 1808.

By 1800 or so, however, African American slavery was once again a thriving institution, especially in the Southern United States. One of the primary reasons for the reinvigoration of slavery was the invention and rapid widespread adoption of the cotton gin. This machine allowed Southern planters to grow a variety of cotton--short staple cotton--that was especially well suited to the climate of the Deep South. The bottle neck in growing this crop had always been the labor needed to remove the seeds from the cotton fibers. But Eli Whitney's gin made it much easier and more economical to do. This fact made cotton production much more profitable and hence very attractive to planters and farmers in the South. Still, growing cotton was very labor intensive and cotton growers needed a large supply of labor to tend the fields. African American slaves supplied this lab.

 There are still many shows about Kara Walker.

1.Barbara Krakow Gallery

2.Whitney Museum of American Art 1 2

3. you can still get all the events about Kara Walker from a web

4.Here is Kara Walker's studio

COLLECTIONS FROM

 

The Baltimore Museum of Art, MD
Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, CA
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
Centro Nazionale per le Arti Contemporanee, Rome, Italy
The Contemporary Museum, Honalulu, Hawaii
The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece
Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Germany
Foundation Museé d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg
Guggenheim Museum, NY
Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
Musee d’Art Moderne, Luxembourg
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Museum voor Modern Kunst, The Netherlands
Princeton University Art Museum
The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL
The Judith Rothschild Foundation
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
The Tate Gallery, London, U.K.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Williams College Museum of Art, MA