Kara Walker's Testimony

Early in her distinguished career, Kara Walker established herself as one of the most important American artists working today. She first became known for creating striking tableaux of black, cut-paper silhouettes adhered directly to stark white museum walls. Satirical scenes depict the violence and sexual exploitation inflicted by white American enslavers on the Black people they enslaved, inflected by the insidious endurance of racial and gender stereotypes in American culture. Walker’s high-contrast installations mimic Victorian shadow portraits and immersive cycloramas, both popular forms of entertainment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

On view in this exhibition were stills from Walker’s silent 16mm film, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (2004), in which the cut-paper silhouettes come eerily to life. They are manipulated as shadow puppets, the hands of their puppet master often in full view. The stills were printed with photogravure, a hybrid technique incorporating elements of photography and printmaking that registers a wide range of tones. Evoking the film’s ominous mood, the soft-focused stills look like images from another time that continue to haunt us. Somehow both sketchy and graphically detailed, these scenes invite us to fill in narrative gaps through collective memory of a shared American history of human enslavement.

This exhibition was generously supported by the Hoene Hoy Photography Fund.