Kara Walker Research Papers

Kara Walker is a contemporary African-American artist who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker lives in New York and is on the faculty of the MFA program at Rutgers University.
Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. Her father, Larry Walker, is a former artist and a retired professor. “One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad’s lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: ‘I want to do that, too,’ and I pretty much decided then and there at age 2½ or 3 that I was an artist just like Dad.” (http://www.art21.org/artists/kara-walker)
Her father accepted a position at Georgia State University forcing her to move to move to Georgia when she was 13. There, she received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and went to Rhode Island to receive her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Walker’s mural Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart gained her attention from the art world in 1994. It was instantly popular, it used cut out silhouettes to depict a world full of slavery. She received John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant at the age of 27 making her the second youngest to ever

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love was the was in Walker Art Center in 2007 and was the artist’s first full-scale U.S. museum survey. Walker has been a professor