Kara Walker - A short bio

By Emma Johnson

(Or read on the University of Minnesota/Voices from the Gaps website http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/karaWalker.html.)

[W]here do these images stem from? Is it your typical black woman shit?”

—Kara Walker in a mock interview question for herself, Renaissance Society of Chicago artist book

“I make art foranyone whos forgot whit it feels like to put up a fight whose forgot what pure sins about.”

—Kara Walker on typed notecard (Narratives of a Negress 36)

“We are not large enough receptacles- individually/ to contain the enormity of suffering caused./ But at least we try”

—Kara Walker on notecard included in Narratives of a Negress 171).

Biography

Kara Elizabeth Walker was born November 26, 1969, in Stockton, California. She spent her childhood in San Francisco, but in 1983, her family moved to Atlanta, Georgia. San Francisco had offered her an integrated and liberal community; so, it was quite a shock for Walker to move to a place where the KKK remained in existence.

Review: Kara Walker’s Darkytown Rebellion

(As seen at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2007;
Original installation made for Brent Sikkema, New York in 2001)
August 20, 2007
By Emma Johnson

(Or read on the University of Minnesota/Voices from the Gaps website http://voices.cla.umn.edu/essays/essays/DarkytownRebellion.html.)

The most intriguing piece for me at the Walker Art Center’s show “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” (Feb 17—May 13, 2007) is “Darkytown Rebellion,” which features the artist’s signature life-size silhouette figures on the walls depicting the antebellum South and surrounds you like cinema in the round.