Black Contemporary American Artists : Kara Walker

At age 28, Kara Walker is one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, “genius,” award. Walker was born in 1969 to scholars in Stockton, California where she grew up in a diverse community. At the age of thirteen, her family relocated to Georgia where her father took a faculty position at Georgia State University. It is here that she would experience the overt racism, cruelty, and violence of the South that would ultimately become the foundation for her career as an artist. Walker works in multiple media forms, including painting, printmaking, silhouettes, installations, and film. She earned her BFA at the Atlanta College of Art and later her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Walker is now a resident of New York and is best known for her large-scale cutout silhouetted figures depicting narratives of Black culture.

Marcopoulos, A. (n.d.), Kara Walker, photograph, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., retrieved January 27, 2023 from https://www.theartstory.org/artist/walker-kara/

Oh, J. (2016). Kara Walker artist overview and analysis. The Art Story. Retrieved January 30, 2023 from https://www.theartstory.org/artist/walker-kara/

Kara Walker,  Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-boats, From the Portfolio Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005,  lithograph and screen print on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kara-walker-2674

Kara Walker, Resurrection Story With Patrons. 2017, etching, aquatint, and dry point, three parts, Whitney Museum of American Art, https://whitney.org/collection/works/57036