b. 1969
Kara Walker is an acclaimed American artist known for her provocative and deeply impactful explorations of race, history, and power. Born in 1969, she gained widespread recognition in the 1990s for her large-scale silhouette installations, which depict disturbing yet historically rooted scenes of racial violence, oppression, and gender dynamics. Walker’s work often confronts the brutal history of slavery in the United States, using stark black-and-white imagery to challenge sanitized narratives of the past. By appropriating the visual language of 19th-century cut-paper silhouettes, she creates unsettling tableaus that force viewers to grapple with the enduring legacies of racism and exploitation.
Beyond her signature silhouettes, Walker’s practice spans drawing, film, sculpture, and large-scale installations, all of which interrogate historical memory and the ways in which power is constructed and maintained. Her 2014 installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a monumental sugar-coated sphinx-like sculpture, addressed themes of slavery, capitalism, and labor in relation to the sugar industry. More recently, her 2019 fountain Fons Americanus at Tate Modern reinterpreted colonial monuments to critique the transatlantic slave trade and imperialism. Throughout her career, Walker has remained a bold and influential voice in contemporary art, using her work to challenge dominant narratives and invite difficult but necessary conversations about race, identity, and history.
