"I use a lot of repetition. And it becomes a filmic way of talking because as you put the same image after the other, even though it’s the exact identical image, everyone sees something changing from one image to the next."
"No mere words can Adequately reflect the Remorse this Negress feels ..." (1999)
Installation view at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California
Cut paper and adhesive on painted wall, 10 x 65 feet
Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
"One thing that got me interested in working with silhouettes, but then working on the large scale, had to do with two sorts of longings. One was to make history painting in the grand tradition. I love history paintings. I didn’t realize I loved them for a long time. I thought that they were ridiculous in their pompous gesture. But the more I started to examine my own relationship with history, my own attempts to position myself in my historical moment, the more love I had for this artistic, painterly conceit, which is to make a painting a stage, and to think of your characters, your portraits, as characters on that stage. And to give them this moment, to freeze-frame a moment that is full of pain and blood and guts and drama and glory."
- Kara Walker



Comments