KARA WALKER was born in 1969, in Stockton, California, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, from age 13. At present, she lives in New York. Kara is a well-known artist, particularly for her honest work on race, gender, sexuality, and violence through different media, and she is easily identified by her silhouetted figures that have appeared worldwide.

In 1991, Kara Walker earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Atlanta College of Art, and in 1994, a Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been recognized with many awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997 and the United States Artists, Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. In 2012, Kara became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2015, she was named the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.  

In 2007, The Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, organized with great success Kara’s major survey exhibition, titled Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, which later travelled to the ARC/ Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the Art Institute of Chicago; Camden Arts Centre in London; and Metropolitan Arts Center (MAC) in Belfast.

Kara’s first large-scale public project was a monumental installation, in 2014, on display at the abandoned Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was entitled, A Subtlety: Or… the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. The project, commissioned and presented by Creative Time, consisted of a massive sphinx-like sculpture covered in sugar, which responded to and reflected on the troubled history of sugar.

As a special project of the 2015 Venice Biennale, Sara Walker was selected as director, and set and costume designer for the production of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma at Teatro La Fenice, Venice, Italy.

Kara Walker’s work can be found in museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome; and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt.

The Pasticheur is grateful for Kara Walker’s generosity in allowing us to reproduce some of her work here.

More of her work may be appreciated virtually at her website.

All artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers