Themes
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Early cinema 1896 1915/
Object spotlight the end of uncle tom & the grand allegorical tableau of
Object Spotlight - The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven
Published On
August 16 2022
Author
This silhouette installation by Kara Walker (b. 1969) exposes the violence implicit in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Walker’s artwork rejects mainstream narratives of a glorified old antebellum South, including depictions by white filmmakers well into the twentieth century, and presents a frank and graphic visual history from an African American woman’s perspective.
Born in Stockton, CA, Walker is a multimedia installation artist known for her intricate, large-scale silhouette works that examine race, gender, sexuality, and violence. She studied at the Atlanta College of Art (BFA, 1991) and received a master’s from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she started working with silhouettes. Walker’s work uses drawing, painting, text, shadow puppetry, film, and sculpture to comment on history and stereotypes, but the silhouette has been her primary tool and is essential to the meaning of her work. For her, “the silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.” Walker’s complex scenes draw on practices and traditions like optical illusions and Victorian shadow puppetry, creating ambiguities and conflicting subtexts that make viewers question what they see and believe.
Walker’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2008, when the artist was still in her thirties, the Whitney held a retrospective of Walker's work. In 1997, Walker became the youngest recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007, TIME magazine featured Walker on its list of the 100 most influential Americans. Walker was the United States representative to the 2002 Bienal de São Paulo.
Walker currently lives in New York, where she is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University.
Kara Walker The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, 1995 Linocut paper on wall Collection of Jeffrey Deitch
Learn more:
https://walkerart.org/collections/artists/kara-walker
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/walker-kara