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- #16 in Race
- #28 in Race Issues
- #41 in Black History Month
- #46 in Artists
- #47 in American History
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Kara Walker
Visual Artist; Best Known for her Room-Size Tableaux of Black Cut-Paper Silhouettes that Examine America's Racial and Gender Tensions
Kara Walker is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes that examine the underbelly of America's racial and gender tensions. Her works often address such highly charged themes as power, repression, history, race, and sexuality. Born in Stockton, California, Walker moved to the South at age 13 when her father, artist Larry Walker, accepted a position at Georgia State University and her family relocated to Stone Mountain, a suburb of Atlanta. Focusing on painting and printmaking in college, she received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Walker was included in the 1997 Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Later that year, at the age of 27, she became the youngest recipient of the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant, which launched a public controversy around her work. In 2002 she was chosen to represent the United States in the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in the collections of major museums worldwide. The 2007 Walker Art Center–organized exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love is the artist's first full-scale U.S. museum survey. Walker currently lives in New York, where she is a professor of visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University.
News
The artist Kara Walker, known for her silhouettes invoking history, race and power, has created a mammoth art installation for a soon-to-be-demolished building ...
Artist Kara Walker talks with the L.A. Times on how she spied on people making gestures in front of her sugar sphinx.
On the heels of her wildly successful installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in New York, the artist Kara Walker prepares for a new exhibition and opens up ...
This week, the artist Kara Walker will unveil a major new public artwork at at the decommissioned Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, presented by ...
Kara Walker was barely out of art school when she won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, in 1997. Back then, her early work shocked audiences in part ...
More than 130,000 people saw Kara Walker's sculpture 'A Subtlety' while it was on view at the former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn last summer.
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