Kara Walker (American, born 1969) is best known for cut-paper silhouettes that critically address race, gender, sexuality, and power. Most often taking the form of large-scale tableaux of antebellum stereotypes, they present slavery as an absurd theater of eroticized violence and self-deprecating behavior. Her flat caricatures—mammies, sambos, slave mistresses, masters, and Southern belles—are depicted nearly life-size, arranged in narrative sequences that further exaggerate the already grotesque history of slavery. For Walker, the simplified details of a human form in the black cutouts resonate with racial stereotypes. She has said, “The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.”
Images: Installation shots from Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race on view at The Art Institute of Chicago
(Source: artic.edu)
