Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
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Kara Walker's cheerfully ferocious subject is black experience in a proud nation whose prosperity and might were substantially built on the degrading legacy of black slavery. The first room features a 50-foot-wide diorama in which silhouette figures attached to the curved wall are slightly larger than life-size.
The refined, formal elegance of the artist's debonair design sense is put to the rudest ends. She goes for the subliminal, just below a sensory threshold that divides the world into comfortable dualities of good and evil, purity and vice, conqueror and casualty.
Despite the materials of cut paper on gallery walls, Walker's spiritual and emotional world is neither black nor white. Instead, panoplies of gray flood the scene and an impure vision of racial and gender identity arises.
Learn More
Read Los Angeles Times staff writer Lynell George's interview with Kara Walker. Also check out Times art critic Christopher Knight's full review of the show.
Kara Walker's cheerfully ferocious subject is black experience in a proud nation whose prosperity and might were substantially built on the degrading legacy of black slavery. The first room features a 50-foot-wide diorama in which silhouette figures attached to the curved wall are slightly larger than life-size.
The refined, formal elegance of the artist's debonair design sense is put to the rudest ends. She goes for the subliminal, just below a sensory threshold that divides the world into comfortable dualities of good and evil, purity and vice, conqueror and casualty.
Despite the materials of cut paper on gallery walls, Walker's spiritual and emotional world is neither black nor white. Instead, panoplies of gray flood the scene and an impure vision of racial and gender identity arises.
— Christopher Knight
Times Art Critic
Times Art Critic
Learn More
Read Los Angeles Times staff writer Lynell George's interview with Kara Walker. Also check out Times art critic Christopher Knight's full review of the show.
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