User:Myalucas/sandbox

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Kara Walker
was born on November 26, 1969 in Stockton, California. Her parents are Gwendolyn Walker (mother) and Larry Walker (father) and they raised Kara in Stockton up until the age of 13, where her father got a job in Atlanta, Georgia and they packed up all their belongings and moved there. Ever since the age of 3, Kara Walker has been infatuated with art and made it a huge part of her life growing up. As she got older, she became attending the Atlanta College of Art and her main interests were painting and printmaking, so that is where she drew her focus towards. In 1991, Walker received her bachelor's from the Atlanta College of Art, then three years later, she received her master's from the Rhode Island School of Design.

In school, Walker received a lot of backlash and criticism regarding her work due to the extra pressure being put upon minorities from authority figures. She had to work twice as hard and make her work known so that people would take her work seriously. She focused her artwork on transgressive related topics such as race, sexuality, rape, assault, and different portrayals of African Americans in art, literature, and "historical narratives." At the start of Walker's career she used a specific form of artwork from the 19th century by using black cut out silhouettes to embody the African American features and show her audience that most of her work includes black individuals. Walker's work shows the origins and backstory of the antebellum south, which was a period of time where slavery wasn't looked at as a bad thing but rather "romanticized" by white supremacists as a way to "justify" the situation.

Walker has received a lot of controversy regarding her work and how she presents her work due to biased opinions about what her pieces mean and the story behind them. She is known for not only her black cut out silhouettes, but shadow puppetry, and video animation. In 1997, when Walker was 27, she received an award from the MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, and ever since then, she has been the talk of the town. From the public to the people she works with, Walker has had deal with outsiders not understanding her story or her pieces. In the Hyperallergic article written about Kara, Lucy McKeon, who is a New York-based freelance writer and photographer, wrote that "a prominent handful of black female artists rejected her work as racist, and offensive." McKeon also quoted an artist by the name of Howardena Pindell who stated that "even a willing "weapon against the Black community." This goes to show that many people around Walker weren't a fan of her work and seen it as a fight "against" black people, but in reality, it's to fight for the black community and to embody what they had to endure in the antebellum south and during slavery. In 2010, Walker created a piece called "The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos" and in this piece she is depicting the "chaos" of race, sexuality, and gender all at the same time and many people had some issues about the image itself. This piece was displayed in the reference room of the Newark Public Library in Newark, New Jersey and was soon covered up due to the overwhelming amount of people saying they felt "uncomfortable" looking at the image and didn't find it appropriate to be displayed in a library. As time went on, Library Director Wilma Gray asked for Walker to come in and discuss whether or not her work was allowed to be in their library. Gray also called for a staff meeting in regards to her work. After a Q&A and discussing with the staff of the Newark Public Library, Walker was able to show off her work in their library.

Website: http://www.karawalkerstudio.com/2020 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/kara_walker_official/?hl=en Twitter https://twitter.com/karawalker_art Facebook https://www.facebook.com/people/Kara-Walker/100043017057116/

Early life
In 1980, at the age of 13, Walker's father got a job offer at Georgia State University, so him, Gwendolyn, and Kara moved to Stone Mountain, Georgia. Walker's experience at this new town wasn't ideal and she ended up encountering many different problems throughout her time at this new high school. She would often get called racist slurs, was talked down upon, and soon Walker knew that she wasn't very welcomed at this school. She spent most of her time "escaped into the library and into books where illustrated narratives of the South helped guide her to a better understanding of the customs and traditions of her new environment." When Walker reached college, she had a special spot for painting and printmaking and used this form of art throughout her work. She focused her ideas on race-specific issues and this brought a lot of attention to Walker on top of the extra pressure she was receiving from other students and even the professors. Walker used this attention to improve her work and to really think about how she wanted to show off her work in a way that would grab her audience's attention. She decided to use an older form of art from the mid 18th century, cut-paper silhouettes because she found it to be a very simple way to start off her ideas and work her way into different forms of art.

Career
Walker didn't quite start her journey with her art career until after she moved to Georgia when she was just 13-years-old. In 1986, when she started attending college at the Atlanta College of Art, that is when she began formulating different ideas relating to race, sexuality, sex, and violence. For Walker, this was a way to escape from her current reality of racist comments, discrimination, and taunting, but at the same time, be able to express the realities of the race war in America. She was able to get her bachelor's degree at the Atlanta College of Art in 1991, and just four years later, she received her master's degree, in 1994, at the Rhode Island School of Design. After college, that is when Walker began working on her cut-out paper silhouettes that included paintings, video animations, shadow puppetry, and films. In the same year that she graduated, one of Walker's pieces appeared in a talent show a the Drawing Center in New York where she displayed a 50-foot life-size silhouettes that showed different "disturbing" aspects of the antebellum south. This piece raised a lot of questions and concerns and even other African American artists were bashing Walker's work because it included "racist caricatures" and wasn't appropriate for the public eyes. This is an issue that Walker has dealt with for most of her life and she explains that her work isn't meant to be "easy" to look at or entertaining, and her use of the black cut-outs are meant to say a lot with minimal information "but thats also what the stereotypes do" as Walker said.

Accomplishments and awards

 * When Walker was only 28, in 1997, she received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and was known to be one of the youngest artists to get this kind of recognition. This award was the kickstart to her artistic journey of her work appearing in different galleries and exhibitions all over the world.
 * In 2006, Walker's work was featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her work was titled After the Deluge. This piece was related to Hurricane Katrina and was actually placed next to other collections of "powerful water" pieces from the museum itself, but now included small pieces of Walker's work as well.
 * After, Walker displayed two more huge exhibitions, one was in a traveling show organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota titled My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. The second one was in 2013, titled Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! and was displayed for the Art Institute of Chicago.
 * During the spring of 2014, Walker’s first large scale public project, a monumental installation was on view at the abandoned Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
 * In 2015, Walker was named the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. As a special project of the 2015 Venice Biennale, Walker was selected as director, set and costume designer for the production of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma at Teatro La Fenice, Venice, Italy.

Controversies
Walker has had to deal with different artists and the public discussing about her work and whether it was good or bad, she always makes sure that she still displays her original work as is. Walker has created a lot of. controversy related to her work, but one huge discussion occurred in 2012, when Walker first introduced her work titled The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos and this piece involved the Reconstruction period and the Jim Crow era. It was hung up in the Public Library of Newark, New Jersey and soon enough, the people began talking about it and weren't comfortable looking at this piece, so it was covered. Library Director Wilma Gray held a staff meeting to discuss Walker's work, and also had Walker come and hold a Q&A to explain the backstory behind her art. Walker explains that her work has a "too muchness" to it and that it can become overwhelming to someone who isn't familiar enough with the backstory. In 2019, Walker dealt with some more controversies and arguments regarding her work and whether or not she was "the right person for the job" when it comes to depicting different aspects of slavery in the form of silhouettes, paintings, or films and turning them into these unique, almost humorous pieces. Walker once stated "all of my work catches me off guard, when I surprise myself, I often end up laughing." So not all of her pieces are meant to be "inappropriate" but more as shedding a light on the reality of slavery and what impact it has on African American people. Not everyone sees her work in the same way that she does, which has caused a lot of issues with other artists. In a PBS series called I'll Make Me a World, two artists by the names of Howardena Pindell and Betye Saar commented on Walker's artwork saying "I felt the work of Kara Walker was sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children; that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment."