Kara Walker.
All righty, so I know this entry is super late, but I definitely wanted to bust out some hollers to Kara Walker and her monumental work. First off…huge! Her work was endless and scaled the walls like grapevines. I constantly found myself swiveling my head like a sock puppet, completely overwhelmed and, well, pretty much over- everything. Her work was so forceful in every way - size, color, subject, purpose - and completely revolutionary. Her work forced me to accept a different level of artwork, pretty much a different “brand” altogether. She forced me to understand the injustice, rape, and murder that African slaves were made to go through, and made to accept as life. To be taken from your land and forced, sometimes under pain of death, to no longer be a person, to no longer have the rights to your body, is something that I have never seen expressed through art, and never really felt and seen so vividly and unapologetically. That’s part of her brilliance as well. Kara Walker knows what she wants her viewers to experience, and she makes sure they do, and in a strong way. She doesn’t care how her viewers feel about seeing such explicit images; rape, sexual harassment - these terrors of slavery were never placed before us in such a clear tone, with no holds barred, and no regrets. Racial injustice is still, today, very prominent. We, as humans, should not close our mistakes and guilts into a dusty closet, but rather keep them in the light where we will always remember how it was, and how we do not want it to be; Kara Walker does this. She brings to light subjects that many people were rather kept in the shadows. She understands the purpose of remembering, and for this, I admire her greatly. Just to sum this all up, Kara Walker’s work was breathtaking, awe-inspiring, forceful, violent, explicit, uncomfortable, playful, strong, thought-provoking, aggressive, beautiful, depressing, and unique. I loved it.