When Kara Walker made her solo debut at the UCLA Hammer Museum in 1999, only a single room on the first floor housed her work.
Walker was the first artist featured in the museum’s Hammer Projects series, now considered a barometer for emerging talent, and back then one could really classify her as “emerging.” Walker had appeared onto the art scene only five years before at The Drawing Center gallery in New York City.
The Hammer Museum piece was an explosive fantasy slave narrative set in the antebellum South, a recurring scene in her work. Walker, herself a black woman, crafted it in her familiar black-paper cutout silhouette style, filling white walls with life-sized images of pre-Civil War black stereotypes: a net cast upon a disobedient servant girl, the savage jungle baby, the war-wounded soldier tending to his amputated body.
Walker received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1997, which allowed her work to dig deeper into dark themes, expanding her notoriety.
“I was actually really frightened,” said Walker about the show’s Hammer Project opening. “The sort of heated conversation that comes with my work is not my personality.”
Her return to the Hammer Museum with “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” which opened Sunday and runs until June 8, is the last stop in a four-city international traveling show. Instead of a single room, Walker has an entire museum exhibition space of eight gallery rooms to herself. And she has gone from “emerging artist” to worthy of her own retrospective.
The show’s 96 pieces encompass much of Walker’s work since her 1994 debut, from her early wall silhouettes, to her watercolor paintings, her overhead projector installations and her video pieces. Nearly all the works dig through the same bank of images ““ ambiguous silhouettes of antebellum pop culture perceptions of slaves.
For Walker, the decision to focus so closely on race was the result of troubled soul-searching during her years in art school. After years of avoiding race in her early work, she finally decided to explore her heritage.
“I decided that I was going to discard everything that I knew,” she said at a recent press opening. “Everything that came back to questions of character and an act of self-definition became fair game.
“I’m just going to be as black as I can because I’m black to begin with,” she said.
Scenes from her works look like they were pulled straight from a warped version of “Gone With the Wind.” The cut-paper images originated as an art form of pre-Civil War gentility.
The show’s grand introductory statement is the same one that first put all eyes on Walker in 1994. The 13-by-50 foot wall cutting titled, “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of Young Negress and Her Heart,” juggles both the beautiful and the unsightly.
On one side is a gentleman leaning in to kiss his lady, him with his sword in its hilt and her in a voluminous hoop skirt. But in the rest of the piece more disturbing scenes play out: a black slave boy handles a dead goose to eat, a black woman fellates a white man as he raises his arms in ecstasy, another black woman drops babies out of her crotch.
When the piece showed in New York City, Hammer Museum Director Ann Philbin was then director of The Drawing Center. The two kept in touch and eventually made plans for Walker’s show to stop at the Hammer Museum.
“That piece came out, and a little wave went through New York,” Philbin said.
Walker also caught the eye of Gary Garrels, who was then the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art but now holds the post as Hammer Museum senior curator. He would later work with Walker on shows in San Francisco and helped organize the L.A. opening of her current show.
And though Walker pulls images from hundreds of years ago, Garrels notes the pertinence of the work now.
“The wounds have never really healed,” he said about race relations in the U.S. “The scar tissue is still tender.”
To make her cutouts, Walker sketches on large sheets of black paper with a grease pencil or a pastel crayon, using an X-Acto knife to cut them out. Shadowy images drained of individual identity are the result, and the pieces can have titles as epic as their layouts. Her larger tableaus take up entire rooms, and one title is 51 words long.
Another piece stands at a staggering 12 by 85 feet and includes babies emerging from watermelons, one woman spewing fluids from every opening of her body, another hauling a cart of wheat by a mound of manure. The piece is a cyclorama, placed on the wall of a circular room that gives a viewer a 360-degree view of a moment.
The work is named, “Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “˜Life at “Ol’ Virginny’s Hole” (sketches from Plantation Life)’ See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause.”
Since Walker plays so heavily with racist portrayals of black people, she has also gained the criticism of the black community, protesting the lack of “positive” and “uplifting” figures in her work. Black sculptor Betye Saar sent hundreds of letters out warning against Walker’s work. She and others urged the MacArthur Foundation to rescind the grant they gave her to continue her work.
But some don’t find Walker’s work as a back step against racial equality, but rather they see it as a witty attack against outmoded images.
“This work is about art. It’s about how art can reinvent itself,” Garrels said. “Kara has a huge sense of irony and uncertainty and humor.”
Walker’s work may unearth the grotesque, but the element of romantic Southern fantasy seduces the viewer.
“I’m taking the scum off the surface and diving right in,” she said.