"At this time in my life, I’m ready to accept or own a kind of romance and melancholy or melodrama that I wasn’t ready to reveal before. It was always there in my inner life as an artist, but I was too afraid to share it."
"No mere words can Adequately reflect the Remorse this Negress feels ..." (1999)
"No mere words can Adequately reflect the Remorse this Negress feels at having been Cast into such a lowly state by her former Masters and so it is with a Humble heart that she brings about their physical Ruin and earthly Demise," 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
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
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