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Kara Walker / United States b.1969 / No world (from ‘An unpeopled land in uncharted waters’ series) 2010 / Etching with aquatint, sugar-lift, spit-bite and dry-point on Hahnemühle Copperplate Bright White 300gsm paper / 68.5 x 99cm / Purchased 2010 with a special allocation from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Kara Walker
Kara WalkerNo world (from ‘An unpeopled land in uncharted waters’ series) 2010
Not Currently on Display
Kara Walker is known for her use of silhouettes to create elaborate narratives. These are often set in the southern part of the United States before the American Civil War and deal with the history of slavery. Walker sources her images from historical textbooks and illustrated periodicals, transforming them into cruel yet beautiful shadow plays that reflect on questions and preconceptions concerning race, sexuality and oppression.
For Walker, the silhouette is an apt metaphor for her practice, creating an ironic series of associations that play on physical displacement — blank/black; hole/whole; shadow/substance. Her series of etchings ‘An unpeopled land in uncharted waters’ combines the language of silhouettes with other printmaking techniques to create subtle shifts between light and shade.
Kara Elizabeth Walker was born in Stockton, California, and raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the youngest child of a college professor/painter and a banker. She received her formal art education at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she met her German-born husband, Klaus Bürgel.
Kara gained early fame for her large-scale works of precisely drawn black-paper silhouette dramas, caricaturing the lives of slaves and masters in the antebellum American South.
Walker is represented in museum collections throughout Europe and the United States, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Deutsche Bank; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and The Studio Museum, Harlem; Whitney Museum of American Art; Walker Art Centre and the Tate.
She currently lives and works in New York, USA, where she is a professor of visual arts in the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia University.