Kara Walker is an American artist, born in 1969 in Stockton, California, who cuts life-size figures out of black paper and pastes them on gallery walls to tell the story of slavery in the South. She became known in 1994 with a wall of silhouettes called Gone, won a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, and was attacked by older Black artists. She also made the sugar sphinx in a Brooklyn refinery.
Her figures look like the profiles that Victorian families had cut out of paper for the parlor wall. Up close, they act out sexual and physical violence between masters and the people they enslaved. People come to her name for the silhouettes and stay for the argument they started.
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Gone did not open in a solo show. In 1994 Ann Philbin, then director of the Drawing Center in New York, invited the young painter to join a group exhibition called Selections 1994, and Walker covered a wall fifty feet long with black paper.
The title borrows from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. The figures act out the plantation story that novel sold: a pair of legs under a young woman's skirt, a woman giving birth in the middle of a dance.
The wall made her known in New York. It also brought letters. A few years later a campaign led by an older Black artist, Betye Saar, asked other artists to condemn the work, and Walker, in her own words, found that her attackers "had turned me into a fiction."
What You'll Discover
What the move to Georgia showed her.
Why she gave up painting for paper.
Who set out to stop her.
What was built inside a sugar factory.
What a fountain did to a monument.