An analysis of the Kara Walker Exhibition: By Gennadiy Rozentsvayg
Posted on October 14, 2007
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The Kara Walker exhibition was a thought-provoking display of artwork that really shaped my understanding of slavery as well as the experience of African-Americans during this time period. Kara Walker’s art can be considered controversial because it depicts the lives of African-Americans before the civil war in a less glorious fashion which includes a lot of explicit sexual acts.
Upon entering Kara Walker’s third floor exhibition and looking at the first piece of artwork on the wall, I realized that her art was going to reflect the lives of African Americans in a manner that I’ve never seen before. The faces of African American slaves were exaggerated as to express suffering. This artwork was devised in such a way that the slaves were separated from their white owners, representing a kind of schism that existed between the whites and the blacks during the slavery era.
Walking into the next room, I noticed what looked liked an African-American slave girl “growing out” of a fat peg-legged white man. Upon first gaze I was confused, not understanding the implication of it, but after a couple of seconds I realized that it depicted sexual intercourse between the two. With this in mind, I went back to look at the previous art that I first noticed in the exhibition and discovered several other sex scenes in there, one which include a black girl engaging in oral sex with a white boy as well as an African American man with a distorted penis.
In fact, the exhibition was full of such sexual scenes and I believe it is one of the recurring themes of Kara Walker’s work. Perhaps she wanted to portray the sexual abuse of many African Americans during this time period, something not found in textbooks. Another thought-provoking as well as disturbing sexual scene included a pictorial film that involved homosexual acts between an African American man and his white slave owner.
In addition to sexual abuse, Kara Walker’s exhibition emphasized that during the slavery era, American Americans were always looked upon as inferior to whites no matter how hard they tried to fit in. Also, she showed the hypocrisy of many white confederate leaders who on one hand looked upon African-Americans as an undesirable race of people but on the other hand desired them for sexual pleasure. I found the image portraying this to be a very disturbing but nonetheless an important aspect of her work.
Finally, she tries to make a point through some of her artwork that racist feelings still exist today. This was prevalent in an artwork that contained two African American heads pasted on white bodies along with a person of mixed race in a crowd of just white people.
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