Kara Walker

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. She received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. The artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A 1997 recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award, Walker was the United States representative to the 2002 São Paolo Bienal in Brazil. A full-scale museum survey opened at the Walker Art Center in February 2007.

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED

KARA WALKER: DUST JACKETS FOR THE NIGGERATI
Text by Hilton Als, James Hannaham, Christopher Stackhouse, Kevin Young.
GREGORY R. MILLER & CO.
ISBN: 9780982681367 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 8/31/2013
Forthcoming

ACTIVE BACKLIST

KARA WALKER: A NEGRESS OF NOTEWORTHY TALENT
FONDAZIONE MERZ
ISBN: 9788877572516 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 8/31/2012
Active | In stock

KARA WALKER: BUREAU OF REFUGEES
Text by Kara Walker.
CHARTA/SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO.
ISBN: 9788881586868 | US $39.95
Pub Date: 9/1/2008
Active | Awaiting stock

KARA WALKER: MY COMPLEMENT, MY ENEMY, MY OPPRESSOR, MY LOVE
WALKER ART CENTER
ISBN: 9780935640861 | US $49.95
Pub Date: 3/1/2007
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

KARA WALKER: PICTURES FROM ANOTHER TIME
Edited by Annette Dixon. Essays by Annette Dixon and Robert Reid-Pharr. Interview by Thelma Golden.
D.A.P./UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN MUSEUM OF ART
ISBN: 9781891024504 | US $29.95
Pub Date: 10/2/2002
Out of print | Not available

KARA WALKER: SAFETY CURTAIN
Essays by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nancy Spector, Susanne Neuburger, Vitus H. Weh.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783851600131 | US $15.00
Pub Date: 12/2/2001
Out of print | Not available

Kara Walker

Kara Walker: Dust Jackets for the Niggerati

Text by Hilton Als, James Hannaham, Christopher Stackhouse, Kevin Young.
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.

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.

Kara Walker: A Negress of Noteworthy Talent

Text by Olga Gambari, Luca Morena, Rebecca Walker, Melissa Harris-Perry. Conversation with Richard Flood.
Published by Fondazione Merz

A Negress of Noteworthy Talent documents a multimedia project developed by Kara Walker (born 1969) in Turin: her 2011 solo exhibition at the Fondazione Merz, a workshop for students from the Art Academy and University of Turin, an international conference on the politics and psychology of race stereotypes. The result is a defiantly unresolved exploration of the myth and memory of the African-American experience, an experience not fully collective or personal, but something uncomfortably in between, unfolding in a sinister and humorous shadowland of grotesque silhouettes and puppets. Walker’s Turin project further explores the drama of race that is as much a drama of the unconscious as it is about skin.

Kara Walker: Bureau of Refugees

Text by Kara Walker.
Published by Charta/Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

After the success of the recent touring exhibition My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Kara Walker's silhouetted cut-out figures are a now-familiar but still pungent presence in contemporary art, reenacting uncomfortable, often violent episodes in American race relations and reprising, in their formal simplicity, the ways in which marginalized identities are reduced and distorted into readily legible, caricatured forms. Walker's art continues, in other words, to pose awkward questions straightforwardly. Her imagery derives from the visual language of the antebellum South and the tradition of the minstrel show, which she directs to more disquieting ends. Where her source material parodied African-American culture with a terrifyingly casual jocularity--permitting white Americans to vicariously transgress their own taboos by depicting social chaos and unbridled sexuality--Walker applies that jocularity to her depictions of violence against African-Americans, lending them a hollow, almost slapstick character that is very much at odds with their original function. This latest book features work from a new series that addresses, among other themes, the atrocities committed against former slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Reconstruction program implemented by Congress between 1866 and 1877. These narratives are elaborated into or against geometric scenarios more abstract and compacted than previous sequences by Walker, and with a more extensive use of color.

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

Text by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr, Kevin Young, Yasmil Raymond.
Published by Walker Art Center

Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.

Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time

Edited by Annette Dixon. Essays by Annette Dixon and Robert Reid-Pharr. Interview by Thelma Golden.
Published by D.A.P./University of Michigan Museum of Art

Arguably the most controversial young African-American artist working today, Kara Walker creates vivid and shocking evocations, rooted in stereotypes, of an antebellum world that comments on the system of slavery and its continuing legacy in the American consciousness. In her choice of black cut-paper silhouettes, Walker takes a medium that was extremely fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as part of the neoclassical revival, when the silhouetted images on ancient Greek and Roman vases were emulated on such goods as Wedgwood ware. The silhouette was a parlor art practiced by genteel ladies and gentlemen, who created portraits, landscapes, and decorative motifs. There were also traveling silhouettists who took their craft around the country. The 18th- and 19th-century silhouette was also associated with the pseudo-science of physiognomy, which held that one could analyze psychological and racial types by studying profiles. Adopting the antiquated medium of the silhouette, Walker has turned it into a powerful force to evoke the complexities of the system of slavery, exploring themes of exploitation, accommodation, and complicity on the part of both the powerful and the oppressed. Pictures From Another Time is the first major publication on the work of this extraordinary artist. It includes nearly 70 examples of her work, including her silhouettes, prints, drawings, projected installations, and watercolors. Texts include an interview with the artist by curator Thelma Golden, Deputy Director of Programs at The Studio Museum in Harlem; and essays by literary critic Robert Reid-Pharr, Professor of English at the City University of New York and Annette Dixon, Curator of Western Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Kara Walker: Safety Curtain

Essays by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nancy Spector, Susanne Neuburger, Vitus H. Weh.
Published by Walther König, Köln

For more than 40 years, the safety curtain of the Vienna Staatsoper has been decorated with a picture of Orpheus and Eurydike. No more. American artist Kara Walker's cut-out relief, combining her recognizable nightmarish blend of racism and violence, art, kitsch, and death, inaugurated the curtain's new status as a temporary exhibition space.