Interview to Adriana Rosenberg
This interview was conducted by the Press Department of Fundación Proa.
What aspects of Kara Walker’s work led you to consider this the right moment to present it in Buenos Aires?
I don’t believe there is a single, predetermined moment to present Kara Walker’s work in Buenos Aires. At Fundación Proa, we always understand that being able to show, for the first time in Argentina, the work of key figures of international contemporary art is in itself a significant event. In that sense, Walker holds a central place among the most powerful voices to emerge at the end of the twentieth century—not only in the U.S. context but also globally—through the way she has renewed visual languages and posed urgent questions about history, events, and social structures.
The exhibition proposes a survey of nearly three decades of the artist’s production. What type of curatorial narrative did you aim to construct with this selection, and which key moments did you want to highlight?
The exhibition was not conceived as a retrospective in the strict sense, but rather as an anthology. The goal was not to follow an exhaustive chronological path through Kara Walker’s career, but to construct an overview that would allow us to identify some of the most relevant moments in her production, both in terms of the techniques she employs and the issues she addresses. In that sense, the selection does not follow a linear temporal logic, but instead gathers a group of works that together provide a broad reading of her artistic practice across nearly three decades.
We were especially interested in showing how her work evolves formally and conceptually. That is why we included early pieces from the mid-1990s, where drawing and video are already present, as well as more recent works linked to her monumental installations. The exhibition thus allows us to appreciate different moments of her career—not attempting to represent every stage, but highlighting those turning points where her expressive resources expand or her questions deepen.
Given that she is an artist with a very extensive output, the curatorial challenge was precisely to construct a selection that preserved the strength of her work without attempting to cover everything. What we proposed was a journey that does not aim to be totalizing but does allow the public to approach the complexity and coherence of a practice that has maintained remarkable intensity over time.
In the local context, what do you think is the greatest conceptual or symbolic contribution of Walker’s work—so anchored in U.S. history yet with universal resonance?
We do not think of Kara Walker’s work as an exclusive document of U.S. history. While many of her works are based on concrete events tied to slavery and racial history in the United States, her approach transcends that framework. What she constructs has profound connections with experiences and processes that also shape Latin America: forms of violence, exclusion, racism, structural inequality, and the different positions taken in relation to historical narratives. In this sense, her work speaks to us from a broader place, tied to the human condition and to the mechanisms that sustain certain hierarchies across geographies and historical moments.
This is why we seek, through public programs, to activate spaces of reflection that connect these issues with our own context. We believe the strength of her work lies precisely in its capacity to pose questions that, while rooted in a specific history, remain relevant in the present. Her works do not enact closure or an intent of a sealed archive, but rather insist on revisiting, dismantling, and reexamining power structures in order to rewrite—or reorder—history.
There is also a very important formal aspect: Walker works with techniques such as printmaking, multiples, animation, and drawing—forms of reproduction and circulation that move away from the notion of the “unique work.” In this sense, her practice also connects with other contemporary practices, such as photography or video, which expand languages and allow us to rethink how images circulate and what kinds of readings they activate in different audiences. This combination of conceptual depth and ongoing experimentation with media is, without doubt, one of the great contributions of her work.
The artist works across multiple supports—from paper to bronze, from installation to animation. How did you think about articulating these diverse languages within Proa’s exhibition spaces, and what dialogue did you seek to generate between form and content?
One of the most interesting challenges was precisely how to articulate, within Proa’s exhibition spaces, a body of work like Kara Walker’s that unfolds across so many different languages. From the beginning, it was clear that we did not want to impose a homogeneous reading or reduce her practice to a single axis. That is why, rather than arranging the works by medium or period, we sought to establish relationships between the forms she employs and the questions she raises in each work.
Proa’s building has a very distinctive architecture, with galleries that can accommodate both large-scale installations and more intimate moments of contemplation. We took advantage of this to support the rhythm of the exhibition: there are spaces where the viewer directly confronts monumental silhouettes, and others where drawing, printmaking, or text appear at a different scale, almost like careful reading. This alternation also reflects the dynamic of Walker’s own work, which can be direct and piercing but also subtle and reflective.
In terms of installation, we sought to ensure that the different supports—paper, bronze, animation—do not function as isolated compartments but rather as parts of a single body of work that, over nearly three decades, has expanded its media without losing coherence.
Given the simultaneity of this exhibition with the Prix Pictet, presented in Gallery 4, what points of contact exist between the two?
Although they are two entirely independent exhibitions, there is a deep connection between Kara Walker’s show and the finalist series of the Prix Pictet currently on view at Fundación Proa. Both address human experience from different angles, but they share a common concern with themes of migration, violence, rituals, exclusion, and the traces that systems of power leave on people and territories.
What interests me in particular is that, beyond the media employed—installation, drawing, and printmaking in Walker’s case; photography and video in that of the Prix Pictet—both proposals convey a strong narrative. There are stories that unfold visually, that not only show but also construct a form of storytelling about the social, the moral, the political. In that sense, there is something profoundly anthropological in both: they portray concrete situations, real people, and scenarios marked by fragility or resistance.
In their own ways, both exhibitions approach the extremes of human experience: from suffering to dignity, from violence to the possibility of imagining other ways of being in the world. The dialogue between them is evident.
What do you think about the role of cultural institutions, or what responsibility do they have in relation to these narratives?
At Fundación Proa we have always understood that the role of a cultural institution is not only to preserve or exhibit but also to generate conversations. Over the years, we have worked with different approaches: from historical exhibitions—such as those dedicated to Futurism or Malevich, which allowed us to address a debt with central figures of twentieth-century art—to shows focused on contemporary debates, such as those of Sebastião Salgado or of many women artists whose work addresses urgent social issues.
Our commitment is to accompany the issues that shape the present, not from the standpoint of immediate urgency but from the conviction that art has a unique capacity to circulate complex questions. We do not seek to provide closed answers or to transmit a single idea; we seek to offer a space where different perspectives can meet, where the public feels invited to think, to contrast, to engage. That, for me, is the most valuable contribution a cultural institution can make: to present the issues in such a way that the public generates debate, to sustain dialogue even when there are no certainties.
Kara Walker, 1996
by Alexander Alberro
https://indexmagazine.com/interviews/kara_walker.shtml
The following excerpts belong to the interview conducted by Alexander Alberro in 1996, published in the online version of Index Magazine.
[…] “In Atlanta I was still painting timidly. Then I started making small pornographic collages framed in ovals. I would cover the explicit parts with silhouettes or with heroines from paperback romance novels. They’re not my favorite works, but they were almost going where I wanted. When I left Atlanta, I slowly abandoned oil painting, shedding its obvious seduction, and began looking for a format that seemed weak… I suppose I consider the silhouette weak. I wanted to find a format that I could seduce. That felt consistent with my mindset, especially at that time, as I was focusing on the Black woman’s body as exotic seductress (bearer of failed seductions, in particular), desire, miscegenation, and all the complexities and historicities of those issues. Eventually, I began cutting silhouettes out of wood with a jigsaw. I did it for the first time in a piece called Genealogy. To some I added eyes, lips, breasts (which looked like eyes), and blindfolds, and arranged them on the wall alluding to a family tree.” […]
[…] “It was a conscious shift. I was determined to improve; to make works that truly stimulated others, not just myself. I thought that if I achieved a radical transformation, then I could do anything. In a way, all this had to do with leaving the South. In Atlanta I was consciously trying to avoid racial themes. It was difficult to actually see those issues there, since the culture is extremely Black and white. There are Black artists in Atlanta working with racial issues, but to me it all looked the same. I didn’t want to be part of that.” […]
[…] “At some point, like many others, I became interested in kitsch objects like Sam Keane’s big-eyed children, which are everywhere in prints. Silhouette images appeared here and there, but I didn’t see them as anything but kitsch. I hadn’t researched their history. I was thinking about Blackness, about minstrelsy, and about the positions I placed myself in Atlanta. I was feeling around to see what kind of person I was perceived to be, or what kind of person I thought I was. I saw myself as someone trapped in stories, like a nebulous, shadowy character in a romance novel—but not one anyone would remember.” […]
[…] “I thought: if painting things one loves and that make sense is ineffective, what happens if one paints things one would never want to see represented? I tried that for a while. The big-eyed girl worked fairly well, but it wasn’t a lasting project. However, silhouetted children kept showing up. At first only as sketches and small paintings, but then they became more frequent. They gained strength when I began thinking about minstrelsy, about representing the Other, and about interracial desire—when I tried to see from the perspective of the white master of American history. The silhouette says a lot with very little information, much like the stereotype. So I saw a connection between the two. The stereotype can communicate a great deal, but it also reduces difference to a single image. In my tableaux, my intention was to make everyone Black and start from there. To begin from this inverted philosophy in which Blackness is equivalent to everything.” […]
[…] “To be honest, I think museums and galleries are like carnivals, especially in New York, which is full of spectators. But I like that veneer of authority that emanates from the art institution, and the fact that people come in expecting to see life from a new perspective. The hard part, of course, is getting them to come in.” […]
[…] “The handmade quality of my work fits the subject matter in an interesting way. I draw like crazy. I doubt an assistant could follow my line. I’m also very sensitive to repressed racist accusations of laziness. I’m amused by those slave narratives that begin by declaring authorship: ‘written by herself,’ and I wonder if some of that informs those who say they like what I do. Besides, I’m pretty fast at cutting. A typical installation takes me about three days. What takes longer is planning how the narrative will work in the room.” […]
[…] “Much comes out of play, out of free association. That’s why sometimes what I do surprises me. If it’s in my head, it must also be in others. In her book Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison analyzes ‘Africanisms’ in literature. I took that approach introspectively: I let myself go and then stepped back to look. I assume the American unconscious is saturated with condescending images like the mammy and the pickaninny. Those memories are everywhere, in flea markets, in scatological humor.” […]
[…] “Humor before psychoanalysis. The kind in which Black characters were always the butt of the joke. Every time I go to a flea market, I see a pickaninny with its head in a toilet. That association between Blackness and excrement evokes an early memory… wondering as a child what color my white friends’ shit was. That bodily humor is important. I relate through that… this Black body… which represents everything except itself. I use humor, but the kind that unsettles. That discomfort is key.” […]
[…] “For me, in the century between the end of the Civil War and the rise of the civil rights movement, the war never ended. The South lost it, but refuses to accept it, and keeps replaying it. And the last 30 years confront us with a new dialogue: the love of the white past and the fear of offending the descendants of slaves. The traces of the past are everywhere in the South. Everything has a sweet coating. But if you scratch the surface… And that happens everywhere. That is American history.” […]
[…] “I love the work of George Grosz, Otto Dix, and their interwar circle in Germany. Also Robert Colescott, for how he mixes wit with militancy. But my teenage idol was Andy Warhol, for his strategy of taking the most obvious things from culture, enlarging them, and putting them in a gallery. But maybe I was more interested in his persona than in his work. I was fascinated by how he operated in the art world, and by the fact that many didn’t know if he was a genius or a wise fool. I identified so much that when he died, people sent me condolence cards. [Laughs]” […]
The Shadow Act https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/08/the-shadow-act
by Hilton Als
The following excerpts belong to a profile of Kara Walker’s work published by writer and theater critic Hilton Als in The New Yorker magazine, October 2007.
[…] “A kind of contemporary Daumier, Walker presents—in large tableaux made with paper-cut black silhouettes as well as in watercolors, drawings, and films—a visual universe that rivals that of the French master. Instead of industrial Paris, Walker roams the mansions and swamps of the antebellum American South to find her characters, whose environments are visual counterparts of their fetid imaginations and rancid souls. Like Daumier, she pays close attention to clothing, which in her work functions as a sign not only of race and class but also of ethics. Her white characters are often fashion creatures, morally broken under their silk folds, while her Black characters wear the uniform of the oppressed: headscarves, aprons, or tattered trousers. But Walker is much more than a caricaturist. Her work has a spiritual quality, a meditative depth that recalls the canvases of the Haitian master Héctor Hyppolite. Where Hyppolite used Catholic and Vodou symbols, Walker’s holy figure is a character she calls the Negress. Small, with braids and sometimes oversized boots, the Negress appears in several of her works, often defecating, vomiting, or farting amid beautiful compositions about bestiality, lynching, or the Christian ethics of slavery. Yet Walker’s belief in the trickster nature of the Negress—in her cunning and will to survive—makes us believe this child can defy fate and prevail.” […]
[…] “In Walker’s work, slavery is a nightmare from which no American has awoken: the subjugation, ownership, and sale of bodies for power or money have deformed both Blacks and whites, leaving us all scarred, hateful, hated, and diminished. The End of Uncle Tom not only engages with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 masterpiece—which James Baldwin called ‘a catalogue of violence’—but also explores the psychological legacy of the acts of brutality it describes. At once historical and contemporary, the piece is a critique of slavery and also of the everyday racism to which modern Blacks remain exposed in these post–political-correctness times. Walker hurls hatred back at us, straight in the face.” […]
[…] “After Walker joined Sikkema, in 1994, the gallery flourished. (It currently operates in a spacious, pristine venue in Chelsea.) ‘I call the gallery the house that Kara built,’ says Sikkema. Walker’s career and personal life also thrived. In 1993 she met Klaus Bürgel, then a faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design. They married in Atlanta in 1996. Between 1994 and 1997, when she received the MacArthur Fellowship, Walker had eight solo shows and participated in more than fifteen group exhibitions. However, that fellowship provoked an attack by what one observer called the ‘thought police’: a group of artists who believed that visual art should be used to ennoble the Black American population, not to expose its family secrets. In the summer of 1997, Betye Saar sent out more than two hundred letters to artists, writers, and prominent political figures, asking them to join a campaign to prevent Walker’s art from being exhibited. ‘I am writing to ask for your help in spreading the word about the negative images produced by the young African American artist Kara Walker,’ it read. Her attached statement began with the question: ‘Are African Americans being betrayed in the name of art?’ Saar objected not only to the content of Walker’s work—which she described as ‘repugnant’—but also to what she saw as its lack of social consciousness, at least as she understood it. Saar’s satirical pieces on advertising stereotypes were firmly framed within a folkloric tradition and presented with a certain complicity and warmth—a kind of wink to the audience. In her predictable universe, ‘the white man’ was mostly to blame. Walker, by contrast, explored not only the white fetishization of control and domination but also the complicity of the Black community in its own emotional enslavement.” […]
[…] “Shortly after, Juliette Harris, editor of International Review of African American Art, wrote an extensive article about the reactions of Black artists and intellectuals to the work of Walker and fellow Black artist Michael Ray Charles. ‘I have nothing against Kara, except that I think she’s young and dumb,’ Saar told Harris. ‘Here we are, at the end of the millennium, seeing very sexist and demeaning works… The fashion today is to be as crude as one wants: television, Rodman, rap. The goal is to be rich and famous. There is no personal integrity… Kara is selling us down the river.’ And with drama, Saar declared: ‘Aunt Jemima has come back with a vengeance.’ About that article, Walker commented: ‘It’s beautiful, because in dismissing what I do, she’s actually doing the same thing I do: creating a stereotype where there once was a person. She uses all the attributes of that person’s humanity—her skin, her hair, her social life—to build another character. The only thing missing is the signature saying: “This is my work. This is my Kara Walker.”’” […]
[…] “In the International Review article, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was one of the intellectuals and artists who came to Walker’s defense. According to Gates, Walker was attempting ‘to liberate both the tradition of representing Blackness in popular and high art forms, and to liberate our people from the debilitating and residual effects that, without doubt, the proliferation of those images has had on the collective unconscious of the African American people.’ And he added: ‘No one could mistake Kara Walker’s images… for realistic images. Only visual illiterates could confuse her postmodern critiques with realistic representations, and that is the difference between the racist original and the postmodern, meaningful, antiracist parody that characterizes this kind of artistic expression.’” […]
Representation as Violence: the Art of Kara Walker
by Vanina Géré
www.awarewomenartists.com
The following excerpts were published in the magazine www.awarewomenartist.com and are taken from the doctoral thesis of Vanina Géré, former student of ENS-Lyon, Global Visiting Scholar at New York University, and PhD from Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris University. Her thesis analyzes the work of American visual artist Kara Walker, research that received the Prix de la Chancellerie des Universités de Paris in 2013. A specialist in contemporary American art, Géré teaches art history in various French institutions and works as a critic and translator of art texts.
[…] For Walker—trained in Adrian Piper’s conceptual art and passionate about oil painting—the silhouette was a deliberate choice. The early nineties were marked by a rejection of painting. After the speculative boom of the eighties, the financial crash led to a turn toward practices using inexpensive materials and more informal modes of production, in a context of strong interest in identity politics and an art scene that was beginning to include minorities. Oil painting, in this framework, was associated with a conservative social order, and the artist linked it to a patriarchal logic that had “somehow relegated her to its margins.” However, the silhouettes also draw on cycloramas—circular panoramic paintings designed to immerse the viewer in a historical event—for their immersive spatial arrangement. Walker identifies both this type of grandiloquent painting and silhouettes as minor art forms, and their fusion allowed her to critique a dominant form through marginal means.” […]
[…] “Anachronism is the structural principle of Walker’s silhouettes, created from the fictional viewpoint of a Black woman who might have lived ‘150 or 200 years ago’ and who would have had limited access to artistic expression. The medium thus highlights the implicit restrictions that framed Black women’s artistic practice in the 1990s. The titles of the works, which often refer to the artist as ‘Negress,’ accentuate her ironic stance and exaggerate the stereotypical expectations imposed on minority artists. Moreover, from the outset, the artist linked the silhouettes with blackface: all the figures are Black, alluding both to the ambiguous Western desire to ‘become Black’ and to the visual strategy of positioning herself within a circuit in which the white majority would expect her to explore her ‘Blackness.’” […]
[…] “Walker’s art is not concerned with the past or with slavery itself. Unlike Fred Wilson in Mining the Museum (1993), it is not about working as a historian or reconciling with a traumatic past. According to art historian Darby English, the installations resemble ‘images of slavery,’ but what is at stake is destabilizing the very possibility of representation, suggesting that the memory of slavery has been buried and irreversibly transformed by its representations.” […]
[…] “The silhouettes address both the symbolic violence of slavery’s representations and their effects on contemporary consciousness, that is, the real impact of images. They operate in the back-and-forth between mental constructions and concrete representations that contaminate everyday life. They reveal the ‘identity’ of the characters only if we agree to read their racial profile, thus acknowledging that we know how to identify signs associated with reducing individuals to caricatures. In this sense, the silhouettes are profoundly conceptual: they are activated not only through perception but also through the personal history and social position of the viewer.” […]
[…] “Considering her work as a critique of representation and of the violence implicit in it helps explain the controversy that has marked her career. In 1997, artist Betye Saar launched a letter-writing campaign to ban the exhibition of Walker’s works, later joined by Howardena Pindell. They accused her of perpetuating negative representations of African Americans and of sullying the memory of slaves opportunistically or unconsciously. The controversy revealed the pressure on minority artists to represent their group in a total and ‘correct’ way and exposed the art world’s tendency to relegate political commentary to artists from marginal backgrounds.” […]
[…] “Walker’s position as a Black woman—a very specific minority—likely influenced the intensity of the debate. The abundance of sexual imagery in her work exacerbated the controversy, since representations of Black women’s sexuality are shaped by the concealment of their sexual exploitation and the fabrication of a supposed hypersexuality. Lisa Gail Collins recalls that for a long time, the Black female nude was absent from the artistic canon, and when it did appear, it reinforced hypersexualized images used to justify systematic rape under slavery and colonialism. In this context, redefining socially acceptable Black femininity largely meant denying the body. However, Walker’s creations depict Black women in search of pleasure. Although the artist’s own body never appears, one can assume that it was precisely the representation of sexuality by a Black woman that caused such a stir—especially when that sexuality was contradictory or perverse. Walker’s use of sexuality serves above all an allegorical function: in That Thing (2006), deliberate bad taste alludes to the masturbatory component of brooding over the past and history.” […]
About Fons Americanus
https://www.tate.org.uk/
The following excerpts are from a text published on the Tate Modern website in London on the occasion of an exhibition of Kara Walker focused on the Monuments series.
[…] “Walker’s decision to create Fons Americanus in the form of a public fountain takes on special relevance in light of recent student-led protests calling for the removal of monuments that celebrate colonial histories both in the United States and the United Kingdom. Fons Americanus completely inverts the logic of celebration and homage associated with monuments. The work raises uncomfortable questions by exploring a history of violence against Black people from Africa and its diaspora, a history that all too often remains unacknowledged.
Upon entering the Turbine Hall, the first thing one encounters is a smaller monument: Shell Grotto. Shaped from scallop shells borrowed from historical and artistic representations of the Roman goddess Venus, Walker’s shell encloses a crying child within a well, almost completely submerged in water. His head barely floats above the surface, as if drowning or emerging from the depths, with streams of water pouring from his eyes.
Walker’s Shell Grotto connects to the ruins of a colonial fortress on Bunce Island in Sierra Leone. Bunce Island was one of many trading forts where European slave traders and African merchants captured and exchanged men, women, and children to be sold into plantations in the New World or the Americas.
The crying child and Walker’s well challenge how these traumatic histories are commemorated today. The child resurfaces from the depths to confront what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget. How can we look at the monuments that occupy our public spaces in a new light?” […]
[…] “The term Black Atlantic describes the fusion of Black cultures with other cultures located around the Atlantic.
The main fountain of Fons Americanus presents an allegory—or extended metaphor—of the Black Atlantic. The concept was first used by historian Paul Gilroy to recognize how the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade has shaped the development of Black identity and culture in America and Europe.
Allegories often rely on caricatures or stereotypes to explore ideas and themes. Each figure symbolizes an abstract concept that, in Walker’s case, is tied to the central concerns of her work. As you move around the fountain, you encounter figures such as Venus, the Captain, and Queen Vicky. Each of them symbolizes different ideas around the transatlantic slave trade and draws from a diverse set of artistic, literary, and cultural references. Every element alludes to images connected to the themes of violence and identity that Walker seeks to evoke or interrogate. What do they remind you of?
On the second tier of her sculpture stands Queen Vicky. On the monument located in front of the gates of Buckingham Palace, Queen Victoria sits regally on her throne, facing The Mall. Walker plays with that image: placed at the back of the fountain, her queen is alive, joyful, and caught in mid-laughter. At her feet lies a crouching personification of Melancholy, the human embodiment of deep sorrow. Her bowed head and hunched posture contrast sharply with Queen Vicky’s vivacity, as she also holds a coconut to her chest, a symbol of life and sustenance.
On the same tier stands the figure of a Kneeling Man. Walker suggests this could be a caricature of Sir William Young, governor of the West Indies. Young owned sugar plantations and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Here, the Kneeling Man pleads and appears in a posture of repentance. A symbol of European colonialism, Walker sculpts this once-powerful man in a position of vulnerability. Slave-led rebellions threatened the economic might of men like Young. Could he be kneeling to ask for mercy from the enslaved laborers? What else does his posture suggest about the story Walker is telling?” […]