Sat 9/10
Mid-career artist Kara Walker, now 46, first made a splash over two decades ago with her cut-paper silhouette pieces that use a medium usually associated with sweet children’s portraits hanging on grandma’s wall or paper doll cutouts. She imbued the usually sentimental form with fraught narratives about history, race, slavery, gender and identity. While she’s worked in a variety of media, she’s still best known for her work on paper, and she seems to continually find new ways to deploy it to add depth and breadth to her familiar concerns.
At the Cleveland Museum of Art, starting today and running through Sat 12/31, visitors will be able to see the debut of a new body of her work titled The Ecstasy of St. Kara. The large-scale drawings on paper deal with nothing less than the rise and fall of a society and explore how religion is used as a tool of subjugation.
“With her new series of large-scale drawings, Kara Walker continues to challenge us to look closely at the blind spots in history and our current society,” says Reto Thüring, curator of contemporary art and co-curator of the exhibition in the museum’s press release. “At the same time, the lens through which Walker critically examines racial stereotypes has shifted to a broader historical and cultural context. Her work remains vital for its ability to speak to current-day politics surrounding racial injustice by questioning historical fact and fiction.”
clevelandart.org/ecstasy-st.-kara-kara-walker