Kara Walker Profile
By: Autumn Bean
BIRTH PLACE: Stockton, California, 1969
MEDIUM: Painting, Silhouettes, Print Making, Installation Art, Film.
STYLE: Contemporary Art; Conceptual Art
TRAINING: Atlanta College of Art Atlanta, GA. 1991, Rhode Island School of Design Providence, RI. 1994
PLACE OF RESIDENCE: New York, New York
Kara Walker’s career is primarily dominated by her interest in silhouettes. Her deliberate choices in medium not only add deeper meaning to her conceptual projects, but also make her a great model for contemporary style of art. She is most well-known for her rawness in her various eye-catching projects depicting racism, sexism, and gender.
Originally born in Stockton, California, in 1969, Kara Walker was raised in Atlanta Georgia after moving there at the age of thirteen. She went on to study at the Atlanta College of Art where she got her BFA in 1991. After, she attended the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated with an MFA in 1994. Walker works in several different mediums such as painting, instillation, and film, but is most popular for her silhouetting.
Walker first began working with silhouettes while she attended the Rhode Island School of Design. The experimentation in this media came after years of working in oil paint and the dissatisfying inability to achieve full abstraction. She exhibited her first silhouetted works while in school but did not receive much popularity until later. The inspiration for her work comes from ignorant misrepresentations of slaves and minority groups in mainstream media. She has been influenced by other artists similarly interested in challenging racism in society. Walker recently has been exhibited in numerous museums and shows around the world.
Her first notably recognized piece, “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart,” was exhibited in the Drawing Center of New York in 1994 and caught the eye and attention of many, ultimately jump-starting her success. More recently, her 2014 commissioned piece “A Subtlety,” installed at an old Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn featured numerous sculptures built from sugar and received worldwide recognition.
Walker currently is a Professor in the MFA program at Columbia University in New York City. Some of her most notable achievements are receiving the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997, being nominated as Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and being selected as director, set and costume designer for a project for the 2015 Venice Biennale.
You can see Kara Walker’s work on display at the following venues: Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome; and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt.
