On Monday, September 19, 2011, Pratt Institute hosted a lecture for Kara Walker in the auditorium of Memorial Hall. Kara Walker is an African-American visual artist who's artwork is known all over the world in websites to museums, to world-wide movies. She paints, draws, does prints, make postcards, and create silkscreens. Kara Walker graduated from Atlanta College of Art and later on transferred to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design). She said that she never really lived in Africa but heard sad scary stories about the people living there. She received a postcard that said "Some class, eh?" which made her "misunderstand" what's going on and "feel complicated seeing the image" (Walker).
Kara Walker is into romance novels. She started using silhouettes due to western romance novels. She believes this lyrical and low comedy artwork is her passion more than painting because it's the "author's desire into the body of the reader" (Walker). She doesn't want to paint because she came from a family of painters trying to find a specific voice or art that's different from others. She also thought that "there's no place for black women in history of western art" (Walker) before she entered RISD.
She also host puppet shows and plays with them telling the watchers about African-Americans being captured, being enslaved, being put in jails, and getting killed. She also talks about the origin in how the Africans came to this place. There are lots of music, music, and lighting in the puppet shows that she hosts.
Where is the rest of your response?
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ReplyDeleteThis post about walker would need to be rewritten to be made coherent. This tells us little about her work and some of what you say misrepresents her work grossly because it is misstated or lacks context. There is no lack of information about her work so it shouldn't have been so muddled, or if you were confused, you should at least pose questions. The quotes you include don't make sense in this context and many of the sentences say things that lack information: e.g. "Kara Walker is into Romance novels." What do you mean by this and how are romance novels connected to her use of silhouettes? And what else was on the postcard that said "some class" that made it problematic for Walker? You really cannot talk about Walker without addressing the issues of race that she is dealing with in all of her work.
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