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Kara Walker

Part of October Files

Edited by Vanina Gere
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Paperback
$24.95 US
The MIT Press
6.06"W x 9"H x 0.62"D   | 15 oz | 26 per carton
On sale Nov 22, 2022 | 264 Pages | 978-0-262-54447-4
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  • Art & Photography > Art > Art History
  • Art & Photography > Art > Fine Art
  • Art & Photography > Art > More Art...
  • Cultural Destinations > Museums > Art
  • Cultural Destinations > Museums > More Museums...
  • Non-fiction > Diversity
  • Non-fiction > Multicultural & Languages > Black/African-American Interest
  • Non-fiction > Multicultural & Languages > More Interests...
  • About
  • Table of Contents
Selected texts that survey the full range of Kara Walker’s artistic practice, emphasizing the work itself rather than the debates and controversies around it.

Kara Walker’s work and its borrowings from an iconography linked to the fantasized and travestied history of American chattel slavery has been theorized and critiqued in countless texts throughout her career. Exegeses of her work have been shaped by the numerous debates on the very debates it generated. How, then, do we approach a work that has been covered by such “thick theoretical layers”? This collection is unique in emphasizing Walker’s work itself rather than the controversies surrounding it. These essays and interviews survey Walker’s artistic practice from her early works in the 1990s through her most recent ones, from her famous silhouette projects to her lesser-known drawings and lantern shows.
 
The texts, by art historians, curators, critics, scholars, and writers engage scrupulously with Walker’s pieces as material works of art, putting them in the context of the sociopolitical and cultural environments that shape—but never determine—them. They include an interview of the artist by Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem; an essay in the form of a lexicon, cataloguing key elements in Walker’s art, by curator Yasmil Raymond; and an essay by volume editor Vanina Géré on Walker’s use of historical archives. Finally, novelist Zadie Smith considers Walker’s public art as counter-propositions to colonial monuments and as a reflection on colonial history.
 
Contributors
Lorraine Morales Cox, Vanina Géré, Thelma Golden, Tavia Nyong’o, Yasmil Raymond, Jerry Saltz, Zadie Smith, Anne M. Wagner, Hamza Walker
Series Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
List of Contributors xiii
Foreword by Vanina Géré xvii
Kara Walker: III-Will and Desire (1996) 1
Jerry Saltz
Cut It Out (1997)/A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste (2006) 17
Hamza Walker
Thelma Golden/Kara Walker: A Dialogue (2001) 43
Thelma Golden
Kara Walker: "The Black-White Relation" (2003) 55
Anne M. Wagner 
Maladies of Power: A Kara Walker Lexicon (2006) 81
Yasmil Raymond
A Performative Turn: Kara Walker's Song of the South (2005) (2007) 129
Lorraine Morales Cox
Subtleties of Resistance: Sweetness and Violence in Kara Walker's A Subtlety (2015) 163
Tavia Nyong'o
"Stories of Mortal Terror": Kara Walker's Six Miles from Springfield and Lucy of Pulaski (2009) (2019) 177
Vanina Géré
Kara Walker: What Do We Want History to Do to Us? (2019) 205
Zadie Smith 
Index of Names 227

About

Selected texts that survey the full range of Kara Walker’s artistic practice, emphasizing the work itself rather than the debates and controversies around it.

Kara Walker’s work and its borrowings from an iconography linked to the fantasized and travestied history of American chattel slavery has been theorized and critiqued in countless texts throughout her career. Exegeses of her work have been shaped by the numerous debates on the very debates it generated. How, then, do we approach a work that has been covered by such “thick theoretical layers”? This collection is unique in emphasizing Walker’s work itself rather than the controversies surrounding it. These essays and interviews survey Walker’s artistic practice from her early works in the 1990s through her most recent ones, from her famous silhouette projects to her lesser-known drawings and lantern shows.
 
The texts, by art historians, curators, critics, scholars, and writers engage scrupulously with Walker’s pieces as material works of art, putting them in the context of the sociopolitical and cultural environments that shape—but never determine—them. They include an interview of the artist by Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem; an essay in the form of a lexicon, cataloguing key elements in Walker’s art, by curator Yasmil Raymond; and an essay by volume editor Vanina Géré on Walker’s use of historical archives. Finally, novelist Zadie Smith considers Walker’s public art as counter-propositions to colonial monuments and as a reflection on colonial history.
 
Contributors
Lorraine Morales Cox, Vanina Géré, Thelma Golden, Tavia Nyong’o, Yasmil Raymond, Jerry Saltz, Zadie Smith, Anne M. Wagner, Hamza Walker

Table of Contents

Series Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
List of Contributors xiii
Foreword by Vanina Géré xvii
Kara Walker: III-Will and Desire (1996) 1
Jerry Saltz
Cut It Out (1997)/A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste (2006) 17
Hamza Walker
Thelma Golden/Kara Walker: A Dialogue (2001) 43
Thelma Golden
Kara Walker: "The Black-White Relation" (2003) 55
Anne M. Wagner 
Maladies of Power: A Kara Walker Lexicon (2006) 81
Yasmil Raymond
A Performative Turn: Kara Walker's Song of the South (2005) (2007) 129
Lorraine Morales Cox
Subtleties of Resistance: Sweetness and Violence in Kara Walker's A Subtlety (2015) 163
Tavia Nyong'o
"Stories of Mortal Terror": Kara Walker's Six Miles from Springfield and Lucy of Pulaski (2009) (2019) 177
Vanina Géré
Kara Walker: What Do We Want History to Do to Us? (2019) 205
Zadie Smith 
Index of Names 227

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