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Kara Walker: 'After the Deluge'
reBlogged via NEWSgrist, 3/25/06:
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Kara Walker with some of her "Burn" (1998), left, and an untitled 1996 silhouette.
Art Review | 'After the Deluge'
Kara Walker Makes Contrasts in Silhouette in Her Own Met Show
By ROBERTA SMITH
About a year ago, Gary Tinterow, the curator in charge of the museum's newly formed department of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, issued a carte-blanche invitation to Ms. Walker, who is known for parlaying the genteel 18th-century art of cut-paper silhouettes into scathing, racially charged installations. She could do whatever she wanted in one of the underutilized mezzanine galleries in the Met's 20th-century wing: a show of her own work, of work from the collections, or a combination of the two. She opted for the combination and began to sort through the museum's holdings in American, European and African art.
But the project turned unexpectedly urgent for Ms. Walker when Katrina struck New Orleans, exposing racial inequities with a starkness perhaps unequalled since the time of the civil rights movement. The post-Katrina spectacle of deprivation, malfeasance and ineptitude inspired Ms. Walker to focus her exhibition on the murky confluence of race, poverty and water in art from various periods. She named it "After the Deluge."
The show's fascinating flow of images, ideas, styles and mediums has as many crosscurrents and undertows as the average river. Race or water figure, blatantly or subtly, in every item in the dense salon-style hanging: a selection of mostly American 19th-century paintings and cut-paper silhouettes, punctuated by Ms. Walker's own works, including a wall-size silhouette piece, three large framed works and 20 works from a series of small framed cut-paper pieces called "American Primitives" from 2001. [...]
If, like Goya, Ms. Walker is a pitiless satirist who skewers the human condition with a grace and precision tantamount to tenderness, you could almost say that Katrina is Ms. Walker's equivalent of Goya's Napoleonic Wars. But not quite: "After the Deluge" includes no post-Katrina work by Ms. Walker. Instead, it reminds us that poverty and even water have also been longtime themes for Ms. Walker; if anything, her work warned of the pathologies that Katrina unleashed. [read on...]
Posted by NEWSgrist on April 07, 2006 at 02:18 PM in Africa, Contemporary, Joy Garnett, MMA | Permalink