Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
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.
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 – 8:00 PM. read the full post
Published by Karma Books, New York. By Robert Hobbs.
In 2002, Kara Walker was selected to represent the United States at the prestigious São Paulo Art Biennial. Curator Robert Hobbs wrote extended essays on her work for this exhibition, and also for her show later that year at the Kunstverein Hannover. Because these essays have not been distributed in the US and remain among the most in-depth and essential investigations of her work, Karma is now republishing them in this new clothbound volume. Among the most celebrated artists of the past three decades, with over 93 solo exhibitions to her credit, including a major survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker is known for her tough, critical, provocative and highly imaginative representations of African Americans and whites reaching back to antebellum times. In his analysis, Hobbs looks at the five main sources of her art: blackface Americana, Harlequin romances, Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, Stone Mountain’s racist tourist attraction and the minstrel tradition. Robert Hobbs (born 1946) has written more than 50 books and catalogs, focusing on such artists as Milton Avery, Alice Aycock, Lee Krasner, Robert Smithson and Kehinde Wiley. Since 1991 he has held the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of American Art in the School of Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2004 he has served as a visiting professor at Yale University. Now based in New York, Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994; soon afterward, Walker rose to prominence for her large, provocative silhouettes installed directly onto the walls of exhibition spaces.
Published by JRP|Editions. Edited with text by Anita Haldemann. Foreword by Kara Walker. Text by Maurice Berger, Aria Dean.
A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2021
This gorgeous 600-page volume, with a printed cloth-over-paper binding, provides an exciting opportunity to delve into the creative process of Kara Walker, one of the most celebrated artists working in the United States today. Primarily recognized for her monumental installations, Walker also works with ink, graphite and collage to create pieces that demonstrate her continued engagement with her own identity as an artist, an African American, a woman and a mother.
More than 700 works on paper created between 1992 and 2020—which are reproduced in print for the first time from the artist’s own strictly guarded private archive—are collected in this volume, thus capturing Walker’s career with an unprecedented level of intimacy. Since the early 1990s, the foundation of her artistic production has been drawing and working on paper in various ways.
Walker’s completed large-format pieces are presented among typewritten notes on index cards and dream journal entries; sketches and studies for pieces appear alongside collages. The result is a volume that allows readers to become eyewitnesses to the genesis of Walker’s art and the transformative power of the figures and narratives she has created over the course of her career.Now based in New York, Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994; soon afterwards, Walker rose to prominence for her large, provocative silhouettes installed directly onto the walls of exhibition spaces. Walker’s work confronts history, race relations and sexuality in a decidedly non-conciliatory manner, urging the public to reconsider established narratives surrounding the experiences of African Americans in particular.
Published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. Edited by Karen Marta. Preface by Dakis Joannou. Introduction and text by Kara Walker.
Kara Walker’s (born 1969) Figa, a sculpture monumental in both size and symbol, was installed at the DESTE Foundation’s Hydra Slaughterhouse in 2017. Once a part of Walker’s colossal 2014 installation A Subtlety at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, Figa is made up of the hand piece from the anamorphic sphinx that gestures a “fig sign,” at once both a symbol of fertility and a “fuck you.” In making a return to the site of the Sugar Factory work and the work’s progeny in Hydra, this book offers critical insight on A Subtlety and Figa. Through extensive photographic documentation of the installation of the hand sculpture in Hydra by Ari Marcopoulos and seven fables written by Walker illustrating the power of folklore, mythology and black identity across the history of the United States, Figa in book form captures a blockbuster exhibition in two parts.
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.
Published by Fondazione Merz. Text by Olga Gambari, Luca Morena, Rebecca Walker, Melissa Harris-Perry. Conversation with Richard Flood.
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.
PUBLISHER Fondazione Merz
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 6 x 8.5 in. / 212 pgs / 80 color / 30 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/31/2012 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2012 p. 100
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788877572516TRADE List Price: $45.00 CDN $55.00
Published by Charta/Sikkema Jenkins & Co.. Text by Kara Walker.
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.
PUBLISHER Charta/Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.5 x 9.5 in. / 120 pgs / 44 color / 50 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/1/2008 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2008 p. 93
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788881586868TRADE List Price: $39.95 CDN $50.00
Published by Walker Art Center. Text by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr, Kevin Young, Yasmil Raymond.
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.
Published by D.A.P./University of Michigan Museum of Art. Edited by Annette Dixon. Essays by Annette Dixon and Robert Reid-Pharr. Interview by Thelma Golden.
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.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Essays by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nancy Spector, Susanne Neuburger, Vitus H. Weh.
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.
PUBLISHER Walther König, Köln
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.75 in. / 112 pgs / 106 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 12/2/2001 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2002
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783851600131TRADE List Price: $15.00 CDN $17.50
Kara Walker: A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be
Kara Walker: Figa
Kara Walker: Dust Jackets for the Niggerati
Kara Walker: A Negress of Noteworthy Talent
Kara Walker: Bureau of Refugees
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time
Kara Walker: Safety Curtain