Kara Walker is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes.
27 Facts About Kara Walker
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Kara Walker has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.
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Kara Walker is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.
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Kara Walker's father, Larry Walker, was a painter and professor.
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When Kara Walker was 13, her father accepted a position at Georgia State University.
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Kara Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994.
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Kara Walker found herself uncomfortable and afraid to address race within her art during her early college years, worrying it would be received as "typical" or "obvious"; however, she began introducing race into her art while attending Rhode Island School of Design for her Master's.
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Kara Walker is best known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery.
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Kara Walker has produced works in gouache, watercolor, video animation, shadow puppets, "magic-lantern" projections, as well as large-scale sculptural installations like her ambitious public exhibition with Creative Time called "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant".
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Kara Walker's influences include Andy Warhol, whose art Walker says she admired as a child, Adrian Piper, and Robert Colescott.
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Kara Walker uses images from historical textbooks to show how enslaved African Americans were depicted during Antebellum South.
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Kara Walker carried on this portrait tradition but used them to create characters in a nightmarish world, a world that reveals the brutality of American racism and inequality.
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Kara Walker depicts the inequalities and mistreatment of African Americans by their white counterparts.
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Kara Walker's work is provocative, emotionally wrenching, yet overwhelmingly beautiful and intellectually compelling.
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In 2002, Kara Walker created a site-specific installation, "An Abbreviated Emancipation," which was commissioned by The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor.
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In March 2013 Kara Walker visited the New Jersey Newark Public Library to discuss the work and the controversy.
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Kara Walker discussed the content of the work, including racism, identity, and her use of "heroic" figures such as Obama.
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In 1997, Kara Walker, who was 28 at the time, was one of the youngest people to receive a MacArthur fellowship.
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In 2007, Kara Walker was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World, Artists and Entertainers, in a citation written by fellow artist Barbara Kruger.
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Kara Walker was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
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Kara Walker has received the Deutsche Bank Prize and the Larry Aldrich Award.
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Kara Walker was the United States representative for the 25th International Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil.
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In 2017, a large scale mural portrait of Kara Walker done by artist Chuck Close was installed in a New York City subway station, part of a MTA public arts program.
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In 2019 Kara Walker was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, as an Honorary Royal Academician.
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Early in her career, Kara Walker lived in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband, German-born jewelry professor Klaus Burgel, whom she married in 1996.
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Kara Walker moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn in 2003 and has been a professor of visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University since then.
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Kara Walker maintained a studio in the Garment District, Manhattan from 2010 until 2017.