Gabe’s version of the Kara Walker exhibition
Posted on October 14, 2007
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The Kara Walker Exhibition surprised me; it was not what I expected. I expected realistic drawings of African slaves being mistreated, but when I got there I saw Kara’s unique form of artwork. Her artwork consisted mainly of black paper cut outlines of people. I thought it was interesting that most figures in each artwork did not have any unique characteristics they were only outlines. Kara Walker’s use of only outlines also gives a sense that all the African Americans were equally treated the same, and that none had more advantages than the others. There was a difference though between the outlines of the African Americans and the white people. The African Americans had short curly hair and were usually naked or had ripped clothing. The white people were generally nicely dressed, and had long hair.
Kara Walker’s main focuses in her artwork were the experiences of the African Americans and their discrimination. One particular painting, cut, showed an African American with slit wrists and blood gushing out, but this person did not show pain, instead she showed signs of happiness with her majestic body movement, the swirling flow of her blood coming out and her joined heels while in the air. This act of happiness when she should really be in pain could suggest that she was used to receiving this pain from her owner and saw it as an act of gratitude from their owner. In her other paper works the African Americans do not show emotions of hate when ordered by the white owners, showing the public that the African Americans were used to mistreatment. I remember in one of her works they are all following the commands of a white lady, she was ordering them to wash her hair and do her laundry, and they did accordingly with no signs of unhappiness.
In some rooms they were showing movies that she made from puppets made of paper cuts acting out a real life experience. One movie in particular was of a young boy that gets his ankle sawed off, so his mother supports him, and breast feeds. At one point he wants to keep on feeding but the mother stops him and out of outrage kills her with his crutch. Kara Walker was trying to emphasize that there was an influence that the owners had on the children. When they didn’t get what they wanted from their slave they punished them.
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