SESSION TEN
Embedded Files
Howardena Pindell (b. 1943), Untitled , #4D, 2009.
Howardena Pindell was one of the first artists whose work was shown at JAM. Just Above Midtown—or JAM—was an art gallery and self-described laboratory led by Linda Goode Bryant that foregrounded African American artists and artists of color. Open from 1974 until 1986, it was a place where black art flourished and debate was cultivated.
"Trained as a painter, Pindell has challenged the staid traditions of the art world and asserted her place in its history as a woman and one of African descent. Since the 1960s, she has used materials such as glitter, talcum powder, and perfume to stretch the boundaries of the rigid tradition of rectangular, canvas painting. She has also infused her work with traces of her labor, obsessively generating paper dots with an ordinary hole punch and affixing the pigmented chads onto the surfaces of her paintings. Despite the effort exerted in the creation of these works, Pindell’s use of rich colors and unconventional materials gives the finished paintings a sumptuous and ethereal quality." (From the Rose Art Museum, "Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen, February 1, 2019 - May 19, 2019).
STUDY QUESTIONS and SUMMARY
What made JAM such a unique response 40 plus years ago for artists in NYC? What about implementing a JAM -like idea today?
In finale, how effective were these group and individual responses in the Civil Rights Movement? What can we conclude from our study of artists and their responses during the Civil Rights Movement?
THE OPENING OF JAM (JUST ABOVE MIDTOWN) GALLERY IN MANHATTAN - EXHIBITING THE WORK OF BLACK ARTISTS IN NEW YORK CITY'S WELL KNOWN GALLERY DISTRICT (1974 - 1986)
*****
CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
ARTISTS OF NOTE: SIMONE LEIGH, DAWOUD BEY, KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, KARA WALKER
THE OPENING OF JAM (JUST ABOVE MIDTOWN) GALLERY IN MANHATTAN IN 1974 - EXHIBITING THE WORK OF BLACK ARTISTS IN NEW YORK CITY'S WELL KNOWN GALLERY DISTRICT (1974 - 1986 )
THE OPENING OF JAM (JUST ABOVE MIDTOWN) GALLERY IN MANHATTAN IN 1974 - EXHIBITING THE WORK OF BLACK ARTISTS IN NEW YORK CITY'S WELL KNOWN GALLERY DISTRICT (1974 - 1986 )
Linda Goode Bryant, American ( b.1949) MoMA
"Over her nearly 50-year career, Linda Goode Bryant has assumed many roles: gallery owner, filmmaker, farmer, entrepreneur. In each position, she has advocated for a connection to “our innate ability to use what we have to create what we need.”1 This has been the guiding principle behind her diverse ventures—from Just Above Midtown gallery (1974–86) to the urban farming initiative she established in 2009, Project Eats—all of which have championed collaboration, curiosity, and experimentation."
THE OPENING OF JAM (JUST ABOVE MIDTOWN) GALLERY IN MANHATTAN IN 1974 - EXHIBITING THE WORK OF BLACK ARTISTS IN NEW YORK CITY'S WELL KNOWN GALLERY DISTRICT (1974 - 1986 ) , cont.
JUST ABOVE MIDTOWN GALLERY
From: 'We Wanted a Revolution:Black Radical Women (1965 - 85)', Brooklyn Museum, April 21,2017 - September 17, 2017.
'In 1974, Linda Goode Bryant, an arts professional who had worked at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, founded Just Above Midtown Gallery (JAM) in the then heart of New York’s commercial art world on West 57th Street. JAM’s mission was to provide a platform for the exhibition and sale of work by black artists equal to the venues available to their white counterparts. The gallery focused on artists working in noncommercial, nonrepresentational styles, including Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, and Howardena Pindell.
In 1977, JAM moved to Tribeca. While the relocation was forced by rent increases, it was also motivated by a desire to join a more like-minded part of the art world. On 57th Street, the goal had been to cultivate a black collector base to create financial sustainability for the gallery and its artists, as well as to empower black participation in the mainstream art world. Downtown, JAM continued to operate as a commercial space, but Bryant and her cohorts prioritized live events, including performances, group meals, readings, and lectures, eventually making the transition to a nonprofit gallery.
As part of the downtown alternative space movement until its closing in 1986, JAM championed “new concepts and materials,” eventually showing the work of artists of all races and collaborating with other downtown spaces. Bryant described JAM as a “laboratory” and provided her artists with a monthly stipend to free them from both the financial concerns and the constraints of the market."
THE OPENING OF JAM (JUST ABOVE MIDTOWN) GALLERY IN MANHATTAN IN 1974 - EXHIBITING THE WORK OF BLACK ARTISTS IN NEW YORK CITY'S WELL KNOWN GALLERY DISTRICT (1974 - 1986 ) , cont.
'How New York's Legendary Just Above Midtown Gallery Spurred Generations of Black Artists to Success' by Alex Greenberger, April 6, 2021, ARTnews
Click on the image on the right for an overview of the beginning of JAM.
An excerpt:
"The gallery that she formed, Just Above Midtown (JAM for short), was opened in 1974 at 50 West 57th Street, in a district filled with white dealers, and it became a haven for Black artists. Many of these artists—among them Hammons, Lorraine O’Grady, Senga Nengudi, and Howardena Pindell—have gone on to achieve success in recent years. Although JAM rarely made major sales in its 12 years, the gallery acted as a crucial node within an ecosystem of Black artists, offering the kind of support that the Castellis and Paces of New York were rarely affording them at the time. (See examples below)
Most importantly, the gallery embraced a venturesome spirit, refusing to commit to a singular aesthetic or a kind of art-making that could easily be commodified. Thomas J. Lax, a Museum of Modern Art curator at work on an exhibition about JAM, said in an interview, “It was creating a space for Black folks to experiment, to not know, to be uncertain.”
See below brief write ups about these four artists who early on in their careers were part of the support system of JAM:
David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, Lorraine O'Grady.
THE OPENING OF JAM (JUST ABOVE MIDTOWN) GALLERY IN MANHATTAN IN 1974 - EXHIBITING THE WORK OF BLACK ARTISTS IN NEW YORK CITY'S WELL KNOWN GALLERY DISTRICT (1974 - 1986 ) , cont.
Four Artists Who Were Likely Encouraged /Supported /Helped by BAM Early in Their Work - Brief Descriptions
" The severe racial disparities affecting the New York scene occasioned a conversation in 1974 between Linda Goode Bryant, then the director of education at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and artist David Hammons. Hammons, who is now widely known for his sculptures making use of ready-made objects in service of koan-like statements about Blackness and visibility, had not yet hit big—he had had two solo shows in Los Angeles, and none in New York. Bryant was familiar with his work already, and asked Hammons why he didn’t show in the city. He responded, “I don’t show in white galleries.” Almost immediately, Bryant knew she had to remedy that." ("How New York's Legendary Just Above Midtown Gallery Spurred Generations of Black Artists to Success" by Alex Greenberger, April 6, 2021, ARTnews.)
David Hammons (b.1943, born in Springfield, lllinois)
David Hammons (b.1943, born in Springfield, lllinois)
David Hammons Is Still Messing With What Art Means" by Holland Cotter, NY Times, March 24, 2016
David Hammons Is Still Messing With What Art Means" by Holland Cotter, NY Times, March 24, 2016
David Hammons Is Still Messing With What Art Means - The New York Times.pdfAn excerpt
"However you read Mr. Hammons’s recent art, and many ways are possible, one central fact holds true: He is messing with — expanding, exploding — ideas of what art means, and especially what “black art” means, making it broad enough to be borderless, useless as a descriptive label by a controlling and abidingly racist market culture. The soundtrack for his survey speaks to this. Years ago it might have been jazz; this time he has filled Mnuchin’s imperious quarters with classical Japanese court music, further shaking up fixed notions of Otherness.
Not that this makes art easy to love, particularly in a time of bloated prices and small ideas. The American writer Marianne Moore began a poem about poetry with these clipped words. “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.” That’s what Mr. Hammons has evidently found in art — the genuinely political, the genuinely beautiful and the outrageously magical — and has been passing on to us these 50 years."
Senga Nengudi (b.1943, born in Chicago, was a featured artist in the Sapphire Show in Los Angeles in 1970, then known as Sue Irons)
"Pulled Bodies, Fabric Spirits, and Celebration: Senga Nengudi's Elusive Art Finds Joy in the Everyday" by Alex Greenberger, Art in America, April 28, 2021.
"Pulled Bodies, Fabric Spirits, and Celebration: Senga Nengudi's Elusive Art Finds Joy in the Everyday" by Alex Greenberger, Art in America, April 28, 2021.
An excerpt
"In 1978, Senga Nengudi, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and other artists—all part of a loose collective known as Studio Z—descended on an area beneath a Los Angeles freeway. Typically frequented by the houseless, the city’s freeway underpasses are also normally filled with urban detritus. On that day, however, for a Nengudi-organized performance known as Ceremony for Freeway Fets, it also played host to clarinetists, drummers, flautists, dancers, and more. Hassinger, who had committed to take part on the day of the event, twirled repeatedly as traffic sped by; Nengudi’s sculptures made of pantyhose were strewn around a set of pylons. A vacant space that typically had a static feel was briefly animated and filled with joy."
Lorraine O'Grady (b. 1934, born in Boston, MA)
"How New York's Legendary Just Above Midtown Gallery Spurred Generations of Black Artists to Success" by Alex Greenberger, April 6, 2021, ARTnews
An excerpt
"O’Grady’s most famous artwork is not an object but a persona—Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a fictional beauty queen who crashed art-world receptions and opined about the state of Black art. Though often best-remembered for her appearance at a New Museum of Contemporary Art event in 1981, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire had actually debuted one year earlier at a JAM opening. She arrived at the gallery wearing a dress festooned with white gloves, and she began flagellating herself with a whip—a reference to the kind of weapons used by slave masters—that she had decorated with chrysanthemums. “BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!” she told the crowd at JAM."
Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire leaves the safety of her home, 1980–83/2009.
Although Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was not officially a JAM-sanctioned work, it shared the sensibility of the offbeat, conceptually rigorous, and difficult art that was being shown within the gallery’s walls"
Howardena Pindell (b.1943, born in Philadelphia)
"I Put the Black Body in the Work." Artist Howardena Pindell on Her New Exhibit Shedding Light on Injustice in America" by Anna Purna Kambhampaty, TIME, Oct. 16, 2020.
An excerpt
"In 1979, Howardena Pindell quit her job in the curatorial department of The Museum of Modern Art to start teaching at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Months into her new profession, she was a passenger in a car accident that left her with a hip injury and a dent in her head, causing memory loss. The near-death situation inspired an epiphany for Pindell, already an artist outside of her working hours: she needed to voice her opinion, she needed to do it now, and her art was the perfect way to do it.
The accident propelled Pindell, then in her mid-30s, into a career making work that overtly touches on subjects others often feared were too political for the art gallery, in groundbreaking pieces like Free, White and 21 and Separate But Equal Genocide: AIDS."
CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
ARTISTS OF NOTE: SIMONE LEIGH, DAWOUD BEY, KERRY JAMES MARSHALL , KARA WALKER
ARTIST OF NOTE: # 1. SIMONE LEIGH
SIMONE LEIGH
"At the Venice Biennale’s US Pavilion,Simone Leigh brings buried stories to the world" The first Black woman artist chosen to represent the United States at this global event, Leigh’s powerful installation broadcasts the forgotten to the world
by Murray Whyte, Globe Staff, Updated April 21, 2022, 11:23 a.m.
Simone Leigh at work in her studio (2021). Click on the right to learn more about her work and current installation at the Venice Biennale.
At the Venice Biennale’s US Pavilion, Simone Leigh brings buried stories to the world - The Boston Globe.pdfSIMONE LEIGH, cont.
Artist Simone Leigh's work transforms the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, wbur, April 22, 2022
Artist Simone Leigh's work transforms the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, wbur, April 22, 2022
An excerpt
"On April 23, Leigh’s exhibition, “Sovereignty,” opens to the public, representing the United States at the 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. During the press conference for the exhibition, Leigh said, “I chose the title sovereignty because I was trying to point to ideas of self-determination — and also to, now, the fourth or fifth generation of Black feminist thought. It’s a very polyglot, complicated thing, but one thing we all agree on is our desire to be ourselves and to have control over our own bodies.”"
Visitors take in Simone Leigh's works in the U.S. Pavilion (below)
"This year, Leigh has added to the pavilion, creating a thatched roof reminiscent of traditional African rondavels that is held up by wooden columns. The changes she made are striking and create a bold juxtaposition to the Jeffersonian building." (below)
ARTIST OF NOTE: # 2. DAWOUD BEY ( b. 1953, born in Queens, NY)
DAWOUD BEY
"Dawoud Bey: An American Project", April 17-Oct 3, 2021, Whitney Museum of American Art.
Click on the image on the right and listen to the 6.37 min. video of Dawoud Bey discussing his work.
An excerpt:
"Since the mid-1970s, Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) has worked to expand upon what photography can and should be. Insisting that it is an ethical practice requiring collaboration with his subjects, he creates poignant meditations on visibility, power, and race. Bey chronicles communities and histories that have been largely underrepresented or even unseen, and his work lends renewed urgency to an enduring conversation about what it means to represent America with a camera."
View below some of Dawoud Bey's work.
#1. "Harlem, U.S.A"
#2 . "Syracuse, N.Y."
# 3. Type 55 Polaroid Portraits
#4. 20 x24 Polaroids
#5. Class Pictures
#6. The Birmingham Project
# 7. Harlem Redux
# 8. Untitled (Picket Fence and Farmhouse) from "Night Coming Tenderly, Black"
DAWOUD BEY, cont.
"Dawoud Bey: An American Project, November 7, 2020 - March 14, 2021" , High Museum of Art
Click on the right and scroll down to Dawoud Bey: An American Project and click to listen to Dawoud Bey in this discussion (9.14 min.)
An excerpt:
"Dawoud Bey: An American Project traces these through lines across the forty-five years of Bey’s career and his profound engagement with the young Black subject and African American history. The title intentionally inserts his photographs into a long-running conversation about what it means to represent America with a camera. The questions of who is considered an American photographer, or simply an American, and whose story is an American story are particularly urgent today. Bey’s work offers a potent corrective to the gaps in our picture of American society and history—and an emphatic reminder of the ongoing impact of those omissions.'
DAWOUD BEY , cont.
"Dawoud Bey, Chronicler of Black American Life" In the seemingly simple gesture of photographing Black subjects in everyday life, the artist helped to introduce Blackness in the context of fine art long before it was trendy, or even accepted. By Lauretta Charlton, Photographs by La Toya Ruby Frazier, T magazine, Oct. 19, 2020.
Link on the image on the right for an overview of Dawoud Bey's views on photography
An excerpt: "Bey, who is 66, is part of a tradition of Black photographers who have elevated the Black subject in contemporary art beyond pure documentation or tedious clichés. He has expanded upon the legacies of James Van Der Zee and Roy DeCarava, whose images of Harlem challenged preconceived notions of being Black in segregated America, as well as the legacy of Gordon Parks, who cataloged the daily lives of Black Americans during the civil rights era. They were artists who, like Bey, could distill an entire era in a single frame, and make small, human moments feel historic in and of themselves. Bey got his start as a street photographer, mostly shooting the people he encountered in and around Harlem and Brooklyn, N.Y. "
DAWOUD BEY , cont.
OPTIONAL READING "Artist Dawoud Bey on Seven Photographs That Shape the Way He Thinks About Race, Landscape and His Own Work", January 29, 2019. The photographs appear alongside Bey's own in his new show at the Art Institute of Chicago,
An excerpt:
"Dawoud Bey’s black-and-white photographs of northern Ohio at night look like ordinary landscapes at first glance: craftsman homes surrounded by picket fences, overgrown expanses of land, waves lurching on the shores of Lake Erie. But it turns out these photos, which Bey shot in and around Cleveland in 2017, depict parts of the Underground Railroad."
“The Underground Railroad is shrouded as much in myth as it is in fact,” the now 60-year-old artist said in a statement on the work. “Using both real and imagined sites these landscape photographs seek to recreate the spatial and sensory experience of those moving furtively through the darkness.”
ARTIST OF NOTE: #3 :KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, (b.1955, born in Birmingham, AL)
Kerry James Marshall photographed in his Chicago studio on December 28, 2015.
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL
"The Epic Style of Kerry James Marshall" by Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker, August 2, 2021.
Click the right image for an overview of the life and work of Kerry James Marshall.
An excerpt:
"Marshall, whose calm manner and impeccable courtesy put people at ease, talks about his work with clarity and precision. “Everything I do is based on my understanding of art history,” he told me recently. “The foundation of art as an activity among human beings has always been some form of representation, and there isn’t a mode of art-making that I haven’t explored, and put into use when it was necessary.” His painting is figurative but not realistic. "
View below work by Kerry James Marshall.
Marshall and his wife, the actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce, in Dawoud Bey’s “Kerry and Cheryl I,” from 1993.
"Lost Boys: AKA BB, by Kerry James Marshall , from 1993
Portrait of the Artist as a 'Shadow of His Former Self"' by Kerry James Marshall, from 1980.
"School of Beauty, School of Culture", from 2012 by Kerry James Marshall
"Black and part Black Birds in America (Grackle, Cardinal & Rose-Breasted Grosbeak)" by Kerry James Marshall from 2020.
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, cont.
OPTIONAL READING Terry James Marshall: Mastry, MOCA, March - July 2017
Marshall’s figurative paintings have been joyful in their consistent portrayal of African Americans. The now nearly 600 year history of painting contains remarkably few African American painters and even fewer representations of black people. Marshall, a child of the civil rights era, set out to redress this absence. “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters,” Marshall has said, “and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go…”
At end of article,. be sure to watch these two short videos about how Kerry James Marshall views the art making process:
'Video for Kerry James Marshall, April 23-Sept. 25, 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago," 6.59 min.
" Kerry James Marshall," New York Times Style Magazine, 2.59 min.
Kerry Jame Marshall : Mastry, An installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), March 12, 2017 - July 3, 2017.
ARTIST OF NOTE: # 4 KARA WALKER (b. 1969) born in Stockton, CA
Kara Walker, 2005 (photo : Cameron Witt Center @ Walker Art Center)
"Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. She has gained national and international recognition for her cut-paper silhouettes depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation. Walker has also used drawing, painting, text, shadow puppetry, film, and sculpture to expose the ongoing psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Her work leads viewers to a critical understanding of the past while also proposing an examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes." Walker Art
"I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without the "struggle"? ( Kara Walker)
Kara Walker, Starting Out, YouTube, 4.31 min
Karen Walker reflects on her early success and offers advice for the next generation.
KARA WALKER
"Kara Walker's Museum Survey in Basel is Difficult, Disturbing - and Very Necessary" by Emmanuel Balogun, artnet news, Sept. 23, 2021.
Click on the picture on the right to read about Kara Walker's Basel show.
If the web site that comes up is empty, you'll need to turn off your ad blocker to see the article.
Click on the right for a review of Kara Walker's exhibition in Basel.
An excerpt:
"Instead, I believe Walker has carved a liberated path for herself and her career exactly by refusing to censor her mind for the prudishness of any audience’s eyes. Walker’s pattern of playing with expected tropes is unmatched. In this epic showcase, this proposition is perhaps most memorably demonstrated in the cathartic “Success and the Stench of Ingratitude,” her 2012 series where the artist reflects on BLACK ARTISTS I ASPIRE TO BE LESS LIKE (as a text embedded in the work states), offering a list: “broke,” “forgotten,” “taken advantage of,” “bitter,” “crassly-commercial,” “short-lived,” and so on."
KARA WALKER, cont.
"Kara Walker's New Drawings Insert Former President Barack Obama Into Art-Historical Allegories - See Images Here", Artnews, March 13, 2020
"In Kara Walker’s new show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., there’s a drawing of former President Barack Obama as Othello, the titular Moorish general of Shakespeare’s 16th-century tragedy, holding the head of his enemy, Iago—who looks a lot like Donald Trump.
It’s one of several recent drawings by the artist depicting Obama in allegorical scenes that mix a mythological past with the racist reality of the present."
Click on the right for more images. Several of these images are shown below.
Kara Walker, 'Allegory of the Obama Years', 2019
Kara Walker, 'Barack Obama Tormented Saint Anthony Putting Up with the Whole Birther Conspiracy', 2019
Kara Walker, 'Barack Obama as an 'African With a Fat Pig', 2019
KARA WALKER, cont.
"Praise, Controversy and Criticism for Kara Walker's New Show", WNYC, September 18, 2017.
On the right is a work from Kara Walker's new show, titled " Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something)"
Read the review below.
"A new exhibit by the artist Kara Walker opened in New York City last week. In 1997, Walker became the youngest person ever to receive a MacArthur "genius" grant. Her show at the Domino Sugar Factory in 2014 drew high praise and tough criticism for its centerpiece — a sculpture of a 75-foot black woman made of sugar.
Never one to shy away from controversy, Walker's artist statement made waves even before the exhibit opened to the public:
"I don’t really feel the need to write a statement about a painting show. I know what you all expect from me and I have complied up to a point. But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of 'having a voice,' or worse, 'being a role model.' Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche. It’s too much, and I write this knowing full well that my right, my capacity to live in this Godforsaken country as a (proudly) raced and (urgently) gendered person is under threat by random groups of white (male) supremacist goons who flaunt a kind of patched together notion of race purity with flags and torches and impressive displays of perpetrator-as-victim sociopathy.
"I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology, and in how many ways will the racists among our countrymen act out their Turner Diaries race war fantasy combination Nazi Germany and Antebellum South — states which, incidentally, lost the wars they started, and always will, precisely because there is no way those white racisms can survive the earth without the rest of us types upholding humanity’s best, keeping the motor running on civilization, being good, and preserving nature and all the stuff worth working and living for?
"Anyway, this is a show of works on paper and on linen, drawn and collaged using ink, blade, glue, and oil stick. These works were created over the course of the Summer of 2017 (not including the title, which was crafted in May). It’s not exhaustive, activist or comprehensive in any way."
Below are several works from this show:
Kara Walker, Sumi ink and collage on paper- 'The Pool Party of Sardanapalus (after Delacroix, Kienholz)', 2017.
Kara Walker, Oil stick on canvas - 'Brand X (Slave Market Painting)', 2017.
Kara Walker, Oil stick, oil medium, raw pigment on linen - 'Cartoon Study for Brand X,' 2017,
Karen Walker, Chine colle', collage and mixed media on paper- 'Bitter Pill', 2017.
Kara Walker, 'Gone, An Historical Romance of Civil War As it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of Young Negress and Her Heart' 1994). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
KARA WALKER, cont.
"Sugar? Sure, but Salted With Meaning" by Roberta Smith, NY Times, May 11, 2014
Click on the right for an overview of this work by Kara Walker.
The introduction;
'With her stinging, site-specific installation at the former Domino Sugar compound on the edge of the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Kara Walker expands her imposing achievement to include three dimensions and monumental scale. In the process, she raises the bar on an overused art-spectacle formula as well as her own work. And she subjects a grand, decaying structure fraught with the conflicted history of the sugar trade and its physical residue to a kind of predemolition purification ritual."
9. ASubtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby’ at the Domino Plant - The New York Times.pdf
“A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” features blackamoors on the way to the main attraction of the exhibition.
OPTIONAL VIEWING CREATIVE TIME Presents KARA WALKER, YouTube, 6.31 min .A behind the scenes view of the construction of this installation by Kara Walker.
KARA WALKER, cont.
OPTIONAL READ Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love", The Modern, July 3, 2008 - Oct. 19, 2008.
"My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, the first full-scale American museum survey of the work of artist Kara Walker, features works ranging from her signature black cut-paper silhouettes to film animations to more than 100 works on paper.
Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained national and international recognition for her room-size tableaux depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation through the genteel 18th-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the American South before the Civil War, Walker's compositions play off stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses, slaves, women, and children enact a subverted version of the past."
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