A detail of “Dante (Free from the Burden of Gender or Race)” by Kara Walker. CreditJake Naughton for The New York Times
After the triumphant “Sugar Baby,” the artist
pushes her incendiary art into the present, merging
collage, political cartoons and history painting.
By ROBERTA SMITHSEPT. 7, 2017
Like most outstanding artists, Kara Walker is unrelenting. In a press statement for her latest show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., she wrote in her familiar, mock-serious yet dead-serious tone that she was “tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model’ ” and of “being a featured member of my racial group and/or gender niche.” But Ms. Walker’s desire to stand down from the demands of her particular brand of fame has not made her stand down in her art, which is as disturbing and challenging as ever, if not more so.Continue reading the main story
Photo
“The (Private) Memorial Garden of Grandison Harris,” with Sumi ink on paper collaged to linen with oil stick, is part of Ms. Walker’s new show at Sikkema Jenkins in Manhattan. CreditJake Naughton for The New York Times
Honing more insistently to her longtime theme — the bitter legacy of slavery in the United States — the works in this assured exhibition unequivocally enter new territory. Narratively, they land solidly where Ms. Walker has only lightly tread: the remorseless, racialized American present, which is suffused with the death rattle of white male domination and its multiple bigotries. Visually they find the artist returning fully to two dimensions after her triumphal public sculpture, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” the monumental and vexatious sugarcoated woman-sphinx of 2014. Now she is pushing with new rigor at the boundaries of her primary medium and material — drawing and paper — merging collage, political cartoon and history painting, and this gives her story line more force.
The show is a brawl of works on paper that has as much the feeling of a studio visit as an exhibition. Coming in various shapes and sizes — worked with Sumi ink, charcoal or watercolor — the paper is cut, torn and collaged, sometimes to canvas or raw linen the shade of tobacco, often with quantities of black paint and sometimes bits of color
Ms.
Walker’s “Christ’s Entry into Journalism,” sumi ink and collage on
paper. The images here are not exclusively contemporary — note a man
resembling the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the lower left corner —
but they implicate current events. The work measures 151 by 191
inches.CreditSikkema Jenkins & Co., New YorkThe show’s centerpiece is the enormous “Christ’s Entry into Journalism” (2017) an 11 by 18 foot collage crowded with over 80 ink drawings of heads and figures. Its title echoes numerous historical depictions of “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” the biblical event preceding his betrayal, trial, death and resurrection; but perhaps journalism’s death and resurrection is the main point. The images here are not exclusively contemporary — note a man resembling the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the lower left corner — but they implicate current events. Across the top of the piece a rebus depicts a rope salesman, a white farmer with a noose, a lynched figure and a Ku Klux Klan member whose parted robe reveals a figure in a suit and an extra-long tie who could be construed as the current occupant of the White House.
More prominent images evoke Civil Rights protesters; a Confederate flag and an arm raised in a Nazi salute; a policeman in riot gear pursuing a protester with a turkey leg and a cellphone; and Batman, carrying a figure wrapped as a mummy whose swollen black face may or may not refer to Emmett Till. At the center, a bare-chested black man raises his chained hands prayerfully. Nearby the severed head of a young black man in a hoodie is seen, upright, on a tray carried by a white woman, like Salome with the head of John the Baptist. More than ever, Ms. Walker’s work piles personages, events and possible interpretations before us, daring us to face her reality — and ours.
