I first encountered Kara Walker’s work at a Sikkema Jenkins show a couple of years ago. I remember looking up at floor-to-ceiling silhouette scenes of an antebellum era; full skirts, long tangled hair, wagons, and weeping willows whose branches scraped the ground. Looking closer, I saw extreme violence: bodies hanging from trees, erect penises bitten by chained women, crazed and smiling faces.

Although Kara Walker’s work has recently come to be appreciated for its insight into the American “post-racial” psyche, her approach has not always been so well received. In 1997, fellow Black female artist Betye Saar led a letter-writing campaign against Walker, sending more than 200 letters to prominent Black figures: “I felt the work of Kara Walker was sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children; that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment." In her book Pictures of Another Time, Walker wrote in response “Had positive imaging of the black body to date solved the problem of representing blackness and power… Unfortunately, repeated denials of racist stigmas have not killed them.” This conception of a direct address of the viewer mirrors the writings of Frankfurt School theoretician Theodor Adorno. In What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?, Adorno writes “one should...turn the argument toward the people whom one is addressing. It is they who should be made conscious of the mechanisms that provoke their racial prejudice.” By presenting recognizable stereotypes of Black people, Walker forces her audience to confront these negative images’ existence in their own minds. Walker’s works become evidence of the culpability of the viewer’s unconscious, embedding so-called past violence in the viewer’s present.

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969, and moved with her family to Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, when she was thirteen. Her father, a painter and art professor himself, served as a strong role model, influencing Walker’s pursuit of an art practice. Kara Walker received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She first became recognized by the art world for her 1994 work, Gone, An Historical Romance of Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart.

Gone, An Historical Romance of Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994).

By employing black paper cut-out silhouettes, a medium originally used for the pseudoscience of physiognomy, Walker invokes a long racist American history. Re-popularized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to justify slavery, physiognomy asserted that examining a person’s facial features (and thus, their silhouettes) could determine character, personality, and intelligence. The silhouette was also used in art-making; artists often practiced in the parlors of wealthy whites, tracing the shadows of patrons’ profiles to create portraits. Walker cleverly appropriates this medium that has been used both to represent the white upper class and to justify slavery through stereotypes of what intelligence looks like (whiteness). In so doing, Walker contends that what actually exists in the silhouette shadow today (our unconscious in the Jungian sense), is the continued presence of stereotypes of Black people.

On view at the New York Museum of Modern Art is a monumental Kara Walker collage: Christ’s Entry into Journalism.

Roxane Gay responds to this work, “Many of the images are difficult and painful and they’re supposed to be. And it is important that you don’t look away—that you sit in that discomfort. There is a lot of productive work that happens in these uncomfortable spaces where we are forced to confront history.” When I saw this collage, it felt like I had been punched in the gut. At the top of the composition, three figures dangle from a tree branch; the center figure has been hung, and the two figures framing him swing from trapezes. A white man holding a noose points up at them. White cloaked figures hold a confederate flag. Another figure holds a black clown head on a stick. Women with big hair punctuate the space in hooped skirts. A Black man at the center of the work has his hands chained together in prayer or pleading. A riot police-man strikes a Black man, all-the-while filming with his iPhone. A white woman holds Trayvon Martin’s head (still in his hoodie) on a platter. MLK’s torso sits in the canvas’ bottom right corner. A figure with a cross on their back throws up their arms in the foreground.

The moment that I try to make sense out of this composition, I become responsible for what I see; there is so much in front of me that everything I name is a choice, even without me realizing. By pointing the black clown head out, for example, I recognize that the Black minstrel stereotype sits in my unconscious mind. This head isn’t “objectively” African American and yet based on its features, I have assumed that it is. In this way, I become responsible for the construction of a racist narrative. Ian Berry astutely notes, “My narrative surely says as much about me and my history, as it does about Walker and hers. And so together artist and viewer conspire in telling the story of race” (2003). In this way, the story that we as individual viewers construct about Walker’s work serves as a window into our unconscious relationships to racial histories. Without realizing, we are making choices about the stories that we see.

African American art critic Antwaun Sargent writes “I realize today that the shame I felt [seeing Walker’s work for the first time] sprang from my acceptance of respectability politics. At that point, I still believed that if black people represented themselves in polite, distinguished ways, white folks might actually see our humanity. I had hope that the institutional racism that allows for police officers to go free after killing us unarmed might somehow correct itself if artists like Walker just painted pictures of black people singing ‘Kumbaya.’...The debasement and indignity exhibited in Walker's Insurrection! flew in the face of those notions. It wasn't what I wanted to see.”

Kara Walker’s work proves that no one is innocent when our society continues to produce ideologies that commit and promptly conceal violence against Black people. Walker refuses to let this violence stay hidden, turning towards her viewers’ unconscious for evidence of continued racism in today’s “modern” society. In this way, Walker’s work prompts continual engagement with our own culpability in past and present oppression, hopefully moving us towards a more honest, self-reflective, and disturbed understanding of our relationships with racial stereotypes. In discussion with Antwaun Sargent, Kara Walker said, “The work is difficult because the history is hard. But don't you want to see it?" “I do,” he writes.

Making Choices About the Stories That We See: Kara Walker's Imprint on American Art

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