Kara Walker

Kara Walker is an American born artist from Stockton, California. I chose her from my presentation, and I'm using this blog to elaborate more about her. Her work primarily deals with race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity. She is known for her life-size paper-cut silhouettes.She moved to a suburb in Atlanta when she was 13 years old after her father, abstract painter Larry Walker, got a job at Georgia State University. It was there that she began to notice an identity crisis within the South. She lived in Stone Mountain, which is the cited birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. She then became obsessed with colonial history and her signature silhouettes evoking themes of slavery and brutality.

Her large scale installations feature nightmarish images of ravaged, distorted or severed bodies that play with the themes of antebellum folklore and racial stereotypes. Her work is both visually beautiful and controversial to her spectators.

While most prominent critics have praised her—Roberta Smith of the Times has said her work conveys the way that "slavery visited degradation equally on all concerned and that its tragic legacy poisons life for all Americans". While others disagree with her work, noted sculptor Betye Saar condemned Walker's work as "revolting and negative… betrayal to the slaves." Cultural conservatives have said that her work produces the kind of politically correct "victim art" that liberal art aficionados attack.
In 2006, she exhibited her work "After the Deluge," which examined the impact of Hurricane Katrina. It also juxtaposes a variety of objects from the Met Museum's collection with her own work in order to explore "the transformative effect and psychological meaning of the sea" and the role assigned to black figures represented in art. Since the Hurricane affected many of the black lower class families, she continued to use her black silhouettes to create 'blackness'.