Kara Walker Essay

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Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California but at the age of 13 she moved to the south with her family. Her father, artist Larry Walker, was offered a teaching position at Georgia State University. Kara attended the Atlanta College of Art where she received her BFA, and then got her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Art. She has many accomplishments including being the youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s genius grant, representing the United States in the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil, and having her first full scale US museum survey at the Walker Art Institute. Currently she resides in New York and is a professor of visual arts at Columbia University. Her signature artwork consists of cut-paper silhouettes. She uses this technique because she sees it as being cartoonist, which in turn allows her to elaborate on racial stereotypes that are reductions of humans. She went to school for drawing and printmaking, but in through her years she has used almost every media possible. She has dabbled in painting, written text, light projection, and video as well as performance. The theme that comes across most in her work is the representation of race. Her silhouettes are all made from black paper which eliminates the need to create skin tones and this allows for all of her characters to be seen as black. She also wants to portray history in a different form. Her characters have exaggerated features which make them cartoonist, and in doing so she adds some humor to the dense subject matter of racism, or power. Kara Walker’s main inspiration is the pre-civil war south. Her art work depicts this time in a skewed fashion. This thought is what makes her art so interesting. She is able to portray history in her own unique way that makes it interesting again to the viewers. She is both trying to entertain and inform us. The past is something

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