Try as some might to keep the issue of racism tucked away like a skeleton in America's closet, the skeleton seems bent on walking around in public almost daily. For proof, just Google "Democratic presidential primaries." Or "Don Imus."
The African-American artist Kara Walker has spent her 15-year career visually riffing on race, creating a brilliant, incendiary and complex body of work, the sensibility of which combines the linear delicacy of Matisse with the comic raunchiness of Richard Pryor.
Ms. Walker is a (quite literally) knife-edged satirist whose best-known works consist of black paper-cutout silhouettes affixed to the wall. But in her hands, this prim Victorian art form has become an assault weapon. Her life-sized narratives combine idyllic images of the Antebellum South with depictions of unspeakable brutality and graphic sexuality, topped off with hearty doses of grim humor and surrealist whimsy. Imagine a house party at Tara with the Marquis de Sade as master of ceremonies.
Ms. Walker's work is the subject of a major retrospective titled "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" opening today at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In addition to paper cutouts, the exhibition includes drawings, watercolors, video installations, collages and texts.
Opening the exhibition is the cutout mural that brought her to the art world's attention in 1994, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War As It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart.
In the piece, a Southern belle in hoopskirt leans in for a kiss from her genteel beau beneath a postcard moon. But there's something amiss in the form of an extra pair of feet coming from beneath her skirts. Someone else, it would seem, is in there. Other images in the mural provide running commentary (sexual, scatological and comical) on the initial scene.
The piece is replete with themes that have occupied Ms. Walker's attention throughout her career: a skewering of Romantic myth, jokes about stereotypes of black sexuality, the sadomasochism linking master and slave. Part of Ms. Walker's genius stems from her ability to sustain her focus while supplying an apparently endless array of new visual cues.
Sly symbolism abounds. Consider those extra feet, for example. Might they represent all the untold stories hiding beneath the skirts of history? Ms. Walker often portrays people vomiting. Have they somehow been forced to expose what they had previously kept hidden inside? The decision to work in silhouette suggests a range of possible interpretations, but here's one: Racism makes two-dimensional caricatures of everyone.
Then there is Ms. Walker's choice of materials, which allows her to play her biggest practical joke. In her world, everyone is black.
"Kara has integrated the histories of both pop art and conceptual art to create something entirely original," says Philippe Vergne, deputy director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the exhibition's curator. "She's highly metaphorical, but I think people also respond to the work intuitively. You can't look at it and not be affected."
The exhibition was installed originally at the Walker (not named for the artist) and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and UCLA's Hammer Museum in Los Angeles before arriving in Texas.
There is something in Ms. Walker's critique to get under the skin of just about everyone. Her mural, Excavated From the Black Heart of a Negress, includes the depiction of a white foreman whipping a bent female slave. A second boss restrains one of her hands, while her other hand clasps a smaller image of the whipping foreman, which she herself holds to her back in order to gain access to his strokes.
Darkytown Rebellion is colorfully lit by an overhead projector positioned in a corner of the room so that the shadow silhouettes of viewers are projected onto the narrative as they enter, including them in the narrative.
Her drawings and texts are no less inflammatory. Everywhere are characters, such as the child from a series of ink and watercolor works titled Negress Notes, who resemble Jim Crow caricatures rather than real people. Sexual images become more graphic. Texts feature language that can't be quoted in a family newspaper.
Ms. Walker's selection as a 1997 MacArthur Foundation genius award winner provoked predictable controversy, including ferocious criticism from an older generation of female African-American artists who objected to her use of racial stereotypes, among other elements of her work.
Yet Ms. Walker's refusal to bow to the sensibilities of others, whoever they may be, is a big part of what gives her work its edge and energy, and what makes it an unforgettable experience for those brave enough to look.
Kevin Richardson is a Dallas freelance writer.
Plan your life
"Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" opens today and continues through Oct. 19 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth. $10; $4 for students and seniors; free on the first Sunday of every month and every Wednesday. 817-735-1161, www.themodern.org.
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