Cut to the quick, an old idiom suggests physical and by extension mental pain. The title of Kara Walker's latest exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art gives a hint to the mood of the show about "slavery, sexism, violence, imperialism", themes which she started to investigate early in her practice and keep being its mainstay. The fifty-three-year-old artist has gained international recognition and created one of her major work Fons Americanus, 2019, for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. The exhibition set in the main gallery of the museum, features more than eighty pieces from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Why Virginia Beach? The resort, largest city in the Hampton Roads metropolitan area, is close to the site of the first landing of twenty to thirty enslaved Africans in 1619. A history refresher is recommended before visiting the exhibit which starts abruptly with scenes of the American Civil War. Twelve enlarged and revised prints of Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War, a two-volume anthology published in 1866 and 1868, feature stenciled silhouettes to complete scenes in which a whole group of the community had been omitted. At first confusing, Kara Walker's Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005, (the series is made of fifteen lithograph and screenprints) offers a new outlook on history. The wall texts are explanatory.
The scholarly beginning is followed by a display of more iconic works including a bronze relief portrait of a heavily featured African woman (False Face, 2017) and black cut-paper silhouettes on white background. The display is not in chronological order and a triptych inspired by Christian altarpieces, revisited through African and antebellum symbols, Resurrection Story with Patrons, 2017, is found next to An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters, 2010, a series of etchings introduced by a poem from Ciona Rouse. Hidden in a cubbyhole due to its graphic content, and easily missed, National Archives Microfilm M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road, 2009, is a 13 mn video depicting rape and pillage with cut-out black puppets on bright backgrounds, the only colors in the show. Testimony, 2005, five framed stills from the video complete the display. More prints of different sizes mainly of the late 1990's and a few short poems from Ciona Rouse all related to the themes listed above are lined up on the walls. The black and white monotonous display is complemented by small scale models of famous works like Fons Americanus, 2019, and The Katastwóf Karavan, 1997, set in glass cases on pedestals in the middle of the room. The former is an uninspiring bronze maquette of the magistral sculpture erected in the middle of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, while the latter brings back memories of the Prospect.4 Triennial in New Orleans where visitors got to share with the community a moment filled with emotions triggered by Kara Walker's installation along the Mississippi River. A playset in stainless steel describes lynching in a burning African village next to a smudgy lithograph illustrating the libretto of the famous opera Porgy and Bess published in 2013. Satiated by images of rape and pillage, the visitor is invited to rest and reflect in a dedicated space offering deep soft cushions, books, mental health resources, a communal journal and a video of the Emancipation Oak projected on a large screen.
A brief reprieve is needed before tackling the series titled The Emancipation Approximation, 1999-2000, where the subjects of rape and miscegenation are treated through mythological references. The succession of twenty six screen prints displayed in the narrow gallery tells a story filled with violent sexual acts between the swan (the white man) and Leda (the black woman). Black babies with white swan heads are born from the forced intercourse. Their silhouettes are drawn on grey backgrounds. The graphic series describing rapes and more sexual perversions is verging on obscenity. The accompanying wall texts about police brutality, health and wealth disparities, mass incarceration and today's nominal freedom of Black Americans, while raising genuine concerns, appear irrelevant to the work, so does its title.
Hailed as a leading artist of her generation, Kara Walker was the youngest recipient of the Mc Arthur Fellowship at the age of twenty eight, and dedicated her career to producing "Black women's art". The eighty works spanning almost twenty five years are a testimony of her commitment. Over the years, she used various media while keeping the graphics of her iconic cut-out black silhouettes, and succeeded in reaching local as well as international audiences. However, her attempts to infuse spirituality to her works like in the triptych Resurrection Story with Patrons, 2017, or give them a mythical dimension, fall flat. Twisting history, she stated: "I'm fascinated with the stories we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales, and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth." At the end, her work, blurring reality and myth, history and tales, may confuse some of her audience and offers little hope.
Betye Saar, one of Kara Walker's detractors, stated in the 1991 PBS series I'll Make Me a World:" I felt the work of Kara Walker was sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children; that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment." It is ironic that the collector who sponsored the exhibition Jordan D. Schnitzer is the scion of a wealthy white family from Oregon.
photographs by the author:
"Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated): Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun Boats", 2005
"African/American", 1998
"Resurrection Story with Patrons", 2017
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