Kara Walker
Subtitle: my complement, my enemy, my oppressor, my love
By: organized by Philippe Vergne ; with texts by Sander L. Gilman ... [et al.].
Contributors: Vergne, Philippe.; Gilman, Sander L.; Walker Art Center.; Whitney Museum of American Art.; UCLA Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Walker Art Center
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 418
ISBN-13: 9780935640861
Subjects: Walker, Kara Elizabeth -- Exhibitions; African Americans in art -- Exhibitions; Race in art -- Exhibitions; Stereotypes (Social psychology) in art -- Exhibitions
Genres: Exhibitions.
Other titles: My complement, my enemy, my oppressor, my love
Description: Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.
Notes: Catalog of an exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minn., Minnesota, Feb. 17-May 13, 2007; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, NY , Nov. 11, 2007-Feb. 3, 2008; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Calif., Feb. 17-May 11, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 396-406) and index.
Table of contents: title: The Black saint is the sinner lady / Philippe Vergne; title: Confessions of an academic pornographer / Sander L. Gilman; title: Triangular trade : coloring, remarking, and narrative in the writings of Kara Walker / Kevin Young; title: Primitivism in the works of an emancipated negress / Thomas McEvilley; title: Spooked / Robert Storr; title: Chronology of Black suffering : images and notes, 1992-2007 / Kara Walker.