Kara Walker
(American, b. 1969)
Deadbrook After the Battle of Ezra’s Church, 2005
Offset lithograph and screenprint on paper
39 x 53 in.
Promised Gift from President Carol Quillen and George McLendon
Kara Walker is best known for her use of the cut-paper silhouette—an 18th-century portrait medium typically reserved for upper-middle-class sitters. Deadbrook After the Battle of Ezra’s Church is part of a series of 15 prints based on Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, a two-volume anthology published in 1866 (copy available at the gallery desk). In these appropriated illustrations from Harper’s overlaid with her signature stenciled figures, Walker continues her ongoing exploration of the Civil War and, specifically, the brutality of slavery. By foregrounding African Americans as central figures in her work, Walker addresses their omission from the historical record.
Biography
Walker holds a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been widely exhibited at major international museums and galleries, including Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; among others. Her important public art projects include a monumental installation commissioned by Creative Time entitled 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, which was on view at the abandoned Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2014, and The Katastwof Karavan, a 2018 project commissioned by Prospect4 and first displayed at Algiers Point, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Her work can be found in such major collections and Walker is the recipient of many awards, notably the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was selected for the Roy Lichtenstein Artist-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome as well as residencies at Instituto Bueno Bista at the Curacao Center for Contemporary Art and Quiet in the Land in Bahia, Brazil. Walker is currently represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and resides in New York.
