Kara Walker

New York-based artist Kara Walker (she/her) is best known for her silhouetted figures that candidly investigate race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Her figures have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including the collections of the Kunstmuseum Basel’s Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Tate Modern; the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI); and the Deutsche Bank Collection. Walker employs various media including drawing, painting, text, installation art, shadow puppetry, film, and sculpture to address the enduring psychological trauma of slavery's legacy, and to foster a critical examination of past and contemporary racial and gender stereotypes.

Walker’s New York debut in 1994 featured Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, a 25-foot wall installation of antebellum American South figures caricatured in silhouette. During the early 2000s, Walker ventured into 16mm film and video installations, including Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (2004). In “…calling to me from the angry surface of some gray and threatening sea. I was transported.” (2007), she used black shadow puppets against vibrant backgrounds to address the spectacle of Black pain.

During the 2015 Venice Biennale, Walker was chosen to serve as the director, set designer, and costume designer for a staging of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma at Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Italy. Walker was also selected by the Tate Modern for the 2019 Hyundai Commission, and responded with a large-scale public sculpture in the form of a four-tiered fountain entitled Fons Americanus. Her sculpture directly alluded to the Victoria Memorial at Buckingham Palace, standing as a “counter-memorial” to subvert the original public function of such monuments in imperialist projects.

Walker was born in Stockton, California, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned a BFA at the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is the winner of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997 and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. In 2022, she received the Gold Medal for Graphic Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Walker is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society, and was named an Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. She lives and works in New York City.