I had the good fortune to see Kara Walker's exhibit at the Hammer Museum hear in Los Angeles. I'm not an artist, nor do I have an educational background in art, but I have to say I was beyond impressed with her work. Her pieces are undoubtedly controversial, especially in an era where I've actually heard people say out loud "There is no racism" and "forget slavery...it was so long ago!" Her artwork, a mix of murals, sketches, wall projections, puppetry, and video, made me think deeply about the existence -both past and present- of oppression in the forms of racism and patriarchy. I proudly hale Kara Walker as one bad ass Invincible Sista.
In her own words...
“I was looking at racist paraphernalia, iconography, and then at these accurate versions of middle-class Americans. I began to associate the silhouette itself, the cutting, with a form of blackface minstrelsy. Here we have these mainly white sitters or a few slaves who were documented in silhouette—but for the most part white sitters whom I identify as middle class because upper class would require a full-fledged oil portrait and that’s what I had already ruled out for myself…’No oil painting here, not going to ape the master that way.’”
A small taste of her work...
clipped from www.pbs.org