Text by Hilton Als, James Hannaham, Christopher Stackhouse, Kevin Young.
African-American artist Kara Walker (born 1969) has been acclaimed internationally for her candid investigations of race, sexuality and violence through the lens of reconceived historical tropes. She had her first solo show at The Drawing Center in New York City in 1994 and, at the age of 28 in 1997, was one of the youngest people to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. This publication documents Dust Jackets for the Niggerati--and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings Submitted Ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker, a major series of graphite drawings and hand-printed texts on paper that grew out of Walker’s attempts to understand how interpersonal and geopolitical powers are asserted through the lives of individuals. In scenes that range from the grotesque to the humorous to the tragic, these works vividly and powerfully explore the themes of transition and migration that run through the African-American experience. The accompanying essays take us through Walker’s saga of American experience--the dual streams of renewal and destruction that trace parallel lines through the last century’s rapid urbanization and the complementary emergence of a “New Negro” identity. Fully illustrated with reproductions of the entire series, and designed by award-winning design studio CoMa with Walker’s close collaboration, Dust Jackets for the Niggerati represents a major contribution to the career of one of our most significant and complex contemporary artists.
Featured image is reproduced from Kara Walker: Dust Jackets for the Niggerati.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The Guardian
Laura Barnett
Walker is one of the most uncompromising contemporary American artists, not just for the quality of her work – which comprises drawing, film, and her signature medium, silhouettes – but for the fact that her art engages with what many would rather forget: the appalling violence meted out to the black population before and after the American civil war and the abolition of slavery, and the legacy of racism that still shapes the US political agenda. [...] Walker has exhibited widely in the US, and at 27 (she's now 43) became the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious MacArthur Foundation's "genius grant" scholarship. But she has also caused controversy. [...] Walker is by now used to viewers being discomfited not only by the fact that her work dares to speak openly about race and identity, but that it may even be making fun of such viewers. "It makes people queasy," she says. "And I like that queasy feeling."
Bookforum
Christopher Lyon
In KARA WALKER:DUST JACKETS FOR THE NIGGERATI, the artist, assisted by the design firm of CoMa, has cleverly folded the dust jacket into a large artwork that includes her entire foreword and a full-scale detail of a large text piece. The fine reproductions include these boldly graphic works as well as her powerfully kinetic figurative drawings. Walker's art engages with historical forms of American popular entertainment, from minstrel shows, vaudeville turns, old movies, and nightclub acts, to public lynchings with postcard souvenirs. Conceiving its images as "potential covers for unwritten essays, works of fiction, and missing narratives of the black migration," Walker transforms the art book from coffee-table objet to black-and-white bomb.
Bookforum
Christopher Lyon
Kara Walker: Dust Jackets for the Niggerati produced with the design firm COMA, unfolds into a large artwork that includes Walker's foreword and a full-scale detail of one of the show's ink-transfer-on-paper text pieces, And modern black identity, 2010.
Walker concieved Dust Jacket's images as "potential covers of unwritten essays, works of fiction, and missing narratives of the black migration," transforming the art book from the coffee-table objet to the conscience catalyst.
"Urban Relocator" (2011) is reproduced from Dust Jackets for the Niggerati, Gregory R. Miller's new monograph on Kara Walker. For the book, Walker solicited texts from four writers—Kevin Young, Hilton Als, James Hannaham and Christopher Stackhouse—to illustrate recent drawings that she had conceived as potential book covers for unwritten essays, works of fiction and missing narratives of the black migration. On her own dust jacket, printed to fold out as a poster, she writes, "Niggerati—a firebrand fusion of Nigger and Literati—was coined with acerbic wit by novelist Wallace Thurman to describe the bohemian vanguard of young black writers and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. In meetings (at Thurman's rooming house described as "Niggerati Manor"), the younger set broke with Alain Locke's controlled message of uplift and embraced sexuality, rage, intra-racial diversity and modernism." continue to blog
The Whitney Museum of American Art, ARTBOOK | D.A.P. and Gregory R. Miller & Co. invite you to join Kara Walker signing copies of her new book, Dust Jackets for the Niggerati, this Wednesday, October 30 from 6:30–8PM. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.25 x 12.25 in. / 144 pgs / 78 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 GBP £40.00 ISBN: 9780982681367 PUBLISHER: Gregory R. Miller & Co. AVAILABLE: 9/30/2013 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.. Text by Hilton Als, James Hannaham, Christopher Stackhouse, Kevin Young.
African-American artist Kara Walker (born 1969) has been acclaimed internationally for her candid investigations of race, sexuality and violence through the lens of reconceived historical tropes. She had her first solo show at The Drawing Center in New York City in 1994 and, at the age of 28 in 1997, was one of the youngest people to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. This publication documents Dust Jackets for the Niggerati--and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings Submitted Ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker, a major series of graphite drawings and hand-printed texts on paper that grew out of Walker’s attempts to understand how interpersonal and geopolitical powers are asserted through the lives of individuals. In scenes that range from the grotesque to the humorous to the tragic, these works vividly and powerfully explore the themes of transition and migration that run through the African-American experience. The accompanying essays take us through Walker’s saga of American experience--the dual streams of renewal and destruction that trace parallel lines through the last century’s rapid urbanization and the complementary emergence of a “New Negro” identity. Fully illustrated with reproductions of the entire series, and designed by award-winning design studio CoMa with Walker’s close collaboration, Dust Jackets for the Niggerati represents a major contribution to the career of one of our most significant and complex contemporary artists.
