ARTISTS
Kara Walker: The Fact of Fiction
Kara Walker entered the annals of art history in the mid-1990s with works that turned the genteel eighteenth-century genre of the cut-paper silhouette on its head, shaping the forms into disquieting panoramic friezes. She creates intense, immersive environments in which starkly depicted figures鈥攗sually black forms against a white wall鈥攅ngage in eroticized, racially charged violence. Her huge tableaus of perverse vignettes address the history of American slavery and the persistent, residual racism of today.
Walker began producing films and videos in 2004, propelling her wall-based works into new dimensions of time and motion. In her videos, the narratives suggested by her stationary silhouettes play out to their full, unsettling potential, illustrating historical traumas not experienced, but transmitted to later generations through stories and images. In the four works presented in this exhibition, Walker takes advantage of our distance from the antebellum era, filling the screen with fantastical yet historically inspired re-imaginings of the past.
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Kara Walker entered the annals of art history in the mid-1990s with works that turned the genteel eighteenth-century genre of the cut-paper silhouette on its head, shaping the forms into disquieting panoramic friezes. She creates intense, immersive environments in which starkly depicted figures鈥攗sually black forms against a white wall鈥攅ngage in eroticized, racially charged violence. Her huge tableaus of perverse vignettes address the history of American slavery and the persistent, residual racism of today.
Walker began producing films and videos in 2004, propelling her wall-based works into new dimensions of time and motion. In her videos, the narratives suggested by her stationary silhouettes play out to their full, unsettling potential, illustrating historical traumas not experienced, but transmitted to later generations through stories and images. In the four works presented in this exhibition, Walker takes advantage of our distance from the antebellum era, filling the screen with fantastical yet historically inspired re-imaginings of the past.
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University of Texas at Austin鈥檚 Landmarks public art program and the university鈥檚 Visual Arts Center (VAC) will co-present four video works by Kara Walker in an exhibition this fall.
