Kara Walker

Kara Walker, born on November 26,1969 in Stockton, California, is a very talented and controversial artist. She has been encouraged to make art since she was young, seeing as her father is an artist and her mother was an administrator, but was always inspired by her family and eventually learned to develop her own identity as an artist. She completed her BFA degree in printmaking and painting at the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in 1994 from the Rhode Island School of Art.
Her art today has progressed from these two simple things into a style that is entirely her own. She now mainly works with butcher paper and chalk, in specifically black paper. Her art mainly explores the racial and gender tensions in America today, specifically in the Antebellum South. Her work also tries to complete the folklore that is so prevalent in the South today by solidifying some of the major details that flow though out many of the stories.
Her work has also had an amazing effect on the African American women who see her work. These works tend to raise identity issues for the women who view it because Walker tends to make the

women figure in the pieces rather soft and malleable, so she can be pushed around and can be used rather easily. They completely tear down what American women  have worked so hard to gain and preserve. Many of the images have been taken from the textbooks that many American children use today, however they have been highly cartoonized. They are very childlike and fantastical, however the images carry a strikingly nightmarish identity.
Her art has been heavily influenced by Andy Warhol's Pop Art of the 1960s. The silhouettes are really striking due to the fact of how realistic they are as well as the images that they portray. Her installations take up an entire room with black butcher paper that have been cut to match her personal drawing of the past events that have happened. These events include the lynching of a black man, the raping of a black slave, and the stabbing of a black woman. The images are grotesque and startling when first seen, but they are very reminiscent of the life that many people before our time have lived.

 I think that her work is really quite stunning because they are just such beautiful drawing, and they bring such a wonderful presence to the piece, yet they reveal a deeper, darker nature that America has been put through. They are really quite sweet figures, however they have a dark and mysterious past. I think that it is really cool how history influences her art because a lot of history also influences my art. I love how she studies and memorizes history and the religion of people to make some really stunning pieces. As an artist, she really influences me, however as a person she really makes an influence on our society, and one that people may not even know exist.