Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Untitled
Kara Walker
Lithograph
Kara Walker is known for her large-scale black and white silhouettes that reflect on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and historical memory. The compelling and frequently disturbing images examine the exploitation of Black labor and the violence inflicted on Black bodies and Black lives by white men, women, and children in the antebellum period through the institution of slavery and its long aftermath.
In this untitled print, ominous clouds fill the sky, their bulbous forms dominating the scene, while in the lower left corner a Black girl wearing a dress and pigtails is shown coming upon a snake and a decapitated head. The young girl is bent over, the hem of her dress billowing behind her, her foot stepping firmly on the wriggling body of the snake, as she peers down at the adult head lying on the ground below. The girl’s fingers and the snake’s whiplash body, a metaphoric double of the whip used on the bodies of enslaved people, draw the viewer’s eyes to the severed head, bringing us back to the horrific scene again and again even as the small figures are dwarfed by the black clouds floating overhead.
The piece is striking in part because as disturbing as the image is for the viewer, the young girl’s gaze is unbroken as if she has witnessed such a scene or its likeness many times before. Walker represents the violence and cruelty regularly committed against Black bodies as simultaneously terrible and mundane.
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Assistant Professor of Design History
Popular between 1790-1840, silhouettes were a common tradition in America amongst white upper class society. This method of artmaking was used for family portraiture, book illustration, and shadow theater. Though historically decorative, Kara Walker transforms this artform to expose horrific and tragic narratives surrounding race, gender and sexuality stereotypes found in history and perpetuated today. Walker’s tableaus range from small prints, as seen here, to room-size installations.
Carrie Kelb