Words matter. These are the best Kara Walker Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have no interest in making a work that doesn’t elicit a feeling.
I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.
Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not.
I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.
I’ve seen people glaze over when they’re confronted with racism, and there’s nothing more, you know, damning and demeaning to having any kind of ideology than people just walking the walk and saying what they’re supposed to say and nodding, and nobody feels anything.
I don’t think that my work is very moralistic – at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonising tendency, and I don’t think visual work operates like that.
There was a manifesto in the late ’60s/early ’70s, and it basically laid out what ‘black art’ was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules – I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.
I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t really know what it was I wanted to say.
I’m a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.
I don’t know how much I believe in redemptive stories, even though people want them and strive for them.
To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what’s not working and challenge it. You riff on things.
A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected… that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.
I took a political stance early on, but I don’t think my work is overtly political. I respond to events.
I trust my hand. If I go into a space with a roll of paper, I can make a work, some kind of work, and feel pretty satisfied.
I grew up partially around Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in that part of the country, there was always this aura of mythology and palpable sense of otherness about being a Southerner.
Humor’s always been the problem of my work, hasn’t it? When working, I feel satisfied when I surprise myself. And when I surprise myself, I wind up laughing.
I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, ‘She’s on our side.’ These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn’t have to deal with.
I’m fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There’s something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.
Once you open up the Pandora’s box of race and gender… you’re never done.
