no world

2010

Kara Walker

Artist, American, born 1969

Greg Burnet

Printer, Australian, born 1953

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.

Media Options

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    color etching, drypoint, and aquatint with sugarlift and spitbite on Hahnemühle Copperplate wove paper

  • Credit Line

    Donald and Nancy de Laski Fund

  • Dimensions

    plate: 60.64 × 90.17 cm (23 7/8 × 35 1/2 in.)
    sheet: 76.84 × 100.49 cm (30 1/4 × 39 9/16 in.)

  • Accession

    2015.42.1


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

(Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NY); purchased 2015 by NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2016

  • Three Centuries of American Prints: from the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery in Prague, Prague 1; Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, 2016 - 2017, no. 144.

Inscriptions

lower left in graphite: A.P. VI/VIII; lower right in graphite: KW 2010

Watermarks

BS lower right: Hahnemühle Fine Art

Wikidata ID

Q77015303


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