Kara Walker’s iconic cut-paper silhouettes, often presented in room-size installations, unflinchingly tackle historic and contemporary issues of racism, gender, sex, slavery, and violence. Based upon imagery of the Antebellum South, Walker’s highly controversial work gained overnight attention at its premiere in 1994, with the mural Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. She became the second youngest artist, at the age of 27, to win the MacArthur Genius Grant and in 2007 was featured in a nationally traveling survey exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota that also appeared in Paris, at The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Texas.
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Walker was born in Stockton, California, daughter of painter and professor Larry Walker. The family moved to Atlanta when her father took a position at Georgia State University. After high school, she attended the Atlanta College of Art, earning a BFA in 1991, and then her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. With the premiere of her 1994 mural her career exploded, though with significant controversy. Walker’s imagery utilizes stereotypical images from the past to reveal ugly and painful subject matter: of racism, power, injustice, and sexuality. The subject matter and popularity of her work has been met by protest from black and white audiences and artists alike.
Walker’s practice now includes painting, printmaking, filmmaking, and installations. She represented the U.S. at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 2002 and became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. In 2015, she was director and set and costume designer for the production of Norma at the Venice Biennale. Walker joined the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2015 as the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts. Her art is held in major collections around the world, including those of the Tate Collection, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.