Kara Walker — Artist Biographical Backgrounds

Kara Walker is an artist best known for her cut-out silhouette images that viscerally explore depictions and caricatures of race, violence, gender, sexuality, and exploitation.

BIOGRAPHY:

• Born in 1969 in Stockton, California and raised in Atlanta, Georgia
• Earned BFA in 1991 from the Atlanta
• College of Art and MFA in 1994 from the Rhode Island School of Design
• Has won many awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Award in 1997 and an Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008
• Was the United States’ representative to the 2002 Bienal de São Paolo
• Is a professor of visual arts for Columbia University’s MFA program
• Currently lives and works in New York
• Interested in the ways people remember and stereotype history, often representing it through deliberately grotesque and uncomfortable imagery
• Often uses a combination of silhouettes, objects and projections to create fully theatrical, immersive installations
• Also draws on the history of shadow puppetry and old animation

“Human behavior is so murky and violet and messed-up and inappropriate. And I think my work draws on that. It comes from there. It comes from responding to situations like that, and if pulls it out of an audience.”

Watch Artist Interview Here