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SITAR is about ANYTHING art. Your art, someone else's art, writing, photography, the art of cooking, the art of sewing and textiles. Sharing historical art, street art, a story about art. Do you have a question or need help with art? Write a blog post and link it up here. We will all try to help with it. My only rule is that if someone asks for critique it must be done with generosity and consideration. 

This is a place of learning, encouragement and inspiration.

 

Today I want to introduce Kara Elizabeth Walker. She was born November 26, 1969.

  Kara is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, and university professor, who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. Walker is most well known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes that interrogate romantic narratives of the antebellum South of the United States. 

 

She is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.

Kara was born in Stockton, California, actually not far from where I lived backed then.  Her father, Larry Walker, was a painter and professor. Her mother Gwendolyn was an administrative assistant. A 2007 review in New York Times described her early life as calm, noting that "nothing about Kara's very early life would seem to have predestined her for this task. Born in 1969, she grew up in an integrated California suburb, part of a generation for whom the uplift and fervor of the civil rights movement and the want it now anger of Black Power were yesterday's news."

When Walker was 13, her father accepted a position at Georgia State University. They settled in the city of Stone Mountain. The move was a culture shock for the young artist. In sharp contrast with the multicultural environment of Central California, Stone Mountain still held Ku Klux Klan rallies. At her new high school, Walker recalls, "I was called a 'nigger,' told I looked like a monkey, accused (I didn't know it was an accusation) of being a 'Yankee. 

Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or "Life at 'Ol' Virginny's Hole (sketches from Plantation Life)". See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper.  144 x 1020 in (365.76 x 2590 cm).
 

Some of her paintings.

 

Kara Walker feature in BOMB magazine 

Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1994.   Walker recalls reflecting on her father's influence: "One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad's lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: 'I want to do that, too,' and I pretty much decided then and there at age 2½ or 3 that I was an artist just like Dad."  She found herself uncomfortable and afraid, however, to address the issues of race within her art during her early college years, worrying it would be received as "typical" or "obvious"; however, she began introducing them into her art while attending RISD for her master's.

Walker once explained her artistic process as "two parts research and one part paranoid hysteria", a description that captures the entanglement of history and fantasy that pervades her work.  Even despite the rational aspect, there's a sense of uneasiness and complexity that ties and illustrates itself through her work.

 

Harvard Art Museum's 

Watch how this incredible piece of art was installed. 
 

Solo Exhibition at kunstmuseum Basel

This video explains her art perfectly.

  

Kara has many sculptures but this one a 2014  massive sculpt is made of sugar. 75 feet long, 35 feet high, and 26 feet wide

Artist Kara Walker’s popular new installation inside Williamsburg's Domino Sugar Factory not only recalls the torrid history of the sugar industry, but is also made of sugar itself. Entitled Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, the project for non-profit Creative Time features a larger-than-life sugar sphinx symbolizing the history of slavery in America. The controversial statue, which is surrounded by piles of sugar, is also joined by sculptures of children cast from molasses. 

To see the slide show click here.

 

The best video 

You don't want to miss this. 

 

Kara's span of 30 years of art is massive. So please take time to view  more of her art on line.

 Today, with the regime we have in the US, where history is being dismantled and erased we need artists like Kara to remind us of this part of US history. 

 

Nicole

 

I'm joining Gillena for 

Christies 

BOMB 

Harvard Art Museum's