Kara Walker

American, born 1969

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American painter and installation artist

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Printed with tones of black, gray, and smoky gray, two oversized hands reach out of an ocean and hold up a masted ship in this horizontal etching, aquatint, and drypoint. Closer to us, the black silhouette of a woman sinks under the surface of the water, face down with her arms thrust back and her mouth gaping open. Her features are exaggeratedly rounded to reference stereotypes historically connected with Black and African people. The wave surges to our left, and the giant hands lift the boat just left of center of the composition. Small in scale, two silhouetted people stand on a flat area to the left. One wears a brimmed, flat-topped hat, a coat with tails, and holds up a tool, perhaps a hoe. The other wears a spiky headdress and skirt and holds up a stalk of sugar cane. The sky is pale gray to either side of a plume of white and a black void with jagged edges, which spreads like a seeping stain down the middle of the sky. Under the image and across the bottom of the page, the artist wrote “A.P. VI/VIII” to the left and “KW 2010” to the right lightly in graphite.
Kara Walker, Greg Burnet, Burnet Editions Master Printers, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., no world, 2010, color etching, drypoint, and aquatint with sugarlift and spitbite on Hahnemühle Copperplate wove paper, Donald and Nancy de Laski Fund, 2015.42.1

no world

Kara Walker, Greg Burnet, Burnet Editions Master Printers, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. · 2010 · color etching, drypoint, and aquatint with sugarlift and spitbite on Hahnemühle Copperplate wove paper ·  Accession ID  2015.42.1

Kara Walker, Burnet Editions Master Printers, Burnet Editions Master Printers, Restraint, 2009, etching with aquatint on wove Somerset paper, Gift of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson, 2024.147.29

Restraint

Kara Walker, Burnet Editions Master Printers, Burnet Editions Master Printers · 2009 · etching with aquatint on wove Somerset paper ·  Accession ID  2024.147.29

Black silhouettes against a white background show men and women engaged in four surreal, nightmarish, sexually suggestive or explicit vignettes. Each vignette takes up about a quarter of the vertical space. To the left, a tall, thin man with noticeably full, protruding lips and a snub nose faces our right in profile, wearing a broad-brimmed hat. A fish hangs from one end of a rod held by one hip. The man stands on one foot, and the other knee is bent so that foot is raised in front of him. Two people kneel at the man’s feet. To our left, a nude woman expresses milk from one breast with one hand and holds a gnarled, mossy stick behind her bottom with the other. Her mouth is open, and the tied ends of the kerchief covering her hair stick up from the crown of her head. A second person, perhaps a boy, is on one hand and knees near the man’s raised foot. The boy holds his other hand at the small of his back, and his lips are also parted. He wears a long-sleeved shirt with ties at the throat, and a band near his knees suggests the folded-down top of tall boots. A smaller fish hangs from a stick near his abdomen, and there are silhouettes of six more fish in the empty space beneath this vignette. In the next vignette, a woman faces our left in profile. Her full lips are slightly parted, and her hair is closely bound or cropped. She is bare chested and wears a knee-length skirt. Her head tilts down toward a mallet she holds in one hand near her chest, and the stems of two branches with sprays of roots beneath seem nailed or driven through her feet. In the third vignette, second from the right, a nude woman lays on a table with her back arched and legs flailing high in the air, as a man holds his hand at her genitalia. The woman’s hair is twisted into short tips and her lips are parted. She raises her head to look down past a firm, bare breast toward the man, one arm hanging down off the table, fingers crooked and spread wide. Slightly crouching, the man has a projecting brow, a long, hooked nose, and a slight double chin. He wears a ruffled shirt, a knee-length apron, and pointed shoes. One hand reaches to the woman’s groin and the other rests on the back of his hip. A knife and a second instrument with a long, narrow blade dangle from the end of the table near the woman’s head. A pheasant-like bird lies under the table near the woman’s outstretched hand. Strings of sausages float or are strung up over the pair, with one shorter string crossing into the vignette to the left. Another string of sausages drapes over the head of the man in the final vignette, to our right. Facing our right in profile, the man is clothed with a big belly, a pointed goatee, full, parted lips, and two peg legs. One hand loosely holds the top of a cracked cane behind his back, and with the other he holds a sausage near his mouth. The inverted nude woman in front of him stands on her hands, her buttocks lined up with and close to his groin. Links of a chain seem to pass around her waist, and possibly around the man. Her back arches and her knees are slightly bent, her feet near the man’s face. A braid or twist of hair tied with a bow hangs down over the back of her head, and there is a skeleton key near her mouth, which is wide open.
Kara Walker, Roots and Links, Inc., 1997, black paper collage on prepared wove paper, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2014.136.226.1-4

Roots and Links, Inc.

Kara Walker · 1997 · black paper collage on prepared wove paper ·  Accession ID  2014.136.226.1-4

Kara Walker, Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times, 1997, bound volume of offset lithographs and five laser-cut, pop-up silhouettes on wove paper, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, 2007.6.275

Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times

Kara Walker · 1997 · bound volume of offset lithographs and five laser-cut, pop-up silhouettes on wove paper ·  Accession ID  2007.6.275