Kara Walker is a contemporary African American artist who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence andidentity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes, such as The Means to an End–A Shadow Drama in Five Acts.
Kara Walker is well known for her expansive tableaux of black and white cut-paper silhouettes that address highly controversial themes as power, repression, history, race, and sexuality.
Born in Stockton, California, Walker moved to the south at the age of 13 when her father accepted a position at Georgia State University. Kara Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Walker first came to art world attention in 1994 with her mural “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart.” This unusual cut-paper silhouette mural, presenting an old-timey south filled with sex and slavery was an instant hit.
At the age of 27, she became the youngest recipient of the coveted John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant. In 2007 Walker Art Center exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love was the artist’s first full-scale U.S. museum survey. Walker currently lives in New York, where she is a professor of visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University. Influences include Andy Warhol, with his omnivorous eye and moral distance; and Robert Colescott, who inserted cartoonish Dixie sharecroppers into his version of Vincent van Gogh’s Dutch peasant cottages.
Some of Walker’s exhibitions have been shown at The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Walker has also been shown internationally and featured on PBS. Her work graces the cover of musician Arto Lindsay’s recording, Salt(2004).
Walker has produced works in ochre gouaches, video animation, shadow puppets, and “magic-lantern” projections, as 
well as a number of black-paper silhouettes, perhaps her most recognizable works to date.
Walker’s silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African American women in particular. However, because of her confrontational approach to the topic, Walker’s artwork is reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Pop Art during the 1960s. Her nightmarish yet fantastical images incorporate a cinematic feel. Walker uses images from historical textbooks to show how African American slaves were depicted during Antebellum South. Some of her images are grotesque.
Walker debuted a public exhibition at the The Drawing Center in New York City in 1994. Her installation Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart “polarized the New York art world”.
In 1997, Walker—who was 28 at the time—was one of the youngest people to receive a MacArthur fellowship. There was a lot of criticism because of her fame at such a young age and the fact that her art was most popular within the white community. In response to Hurricane Katrina, Walker created “After the Deluge,” since the hurricane had devastated many poor and black areas of New Orleans. Walker was bombarded with news images of “black corporeality,” including fatalities from the hurricane reduced to bodies and nothing more. She likened these casualties to African slaves piled onto ships for the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing to America.
Recent works by Kara Walker include Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale at Lehmann Maupin, in collaboration with
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. A concurrent exhibition, Dust Jackets for the Niggerati- and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings submitted ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker, opened at Sikkema Jenkins on the same day.
