Kara Walker Post by Raj
Posted on October 15, 2007
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Kara Walker’s artwork portrayed the negative aspects of African American oppression by the white population. Her most dramatic works show exaggerations of genitals, in terms of their sizes, and interracial rape between whites and blacks, with black women being the victims. These symbolic elements aren’t immediately clear because they are made unconventionally and without any lines or little to no color. For example, when one walks into Walker’s exhibition, one immediately sees pure black figures, some having body parts that are out of proportion, such as of a black boy floating above most of the other figures with gigantic genitals, or of black silhouettes that are very controversial, such as of a black girl having oral sex with a white boy at the beginning of the exhibition. Figures of African Americans with genitals blown out of natural proportion may symbolize the stereotype of having large genitals that might have been unfairly forced upon them. The silhouette of a black girl having oral sex with a white boy symbolizes the controversy and prejudices from society of interracial relationships in an exaggerated way since Walker’s image involves children (not adults). Other unconventional figures included that of a seemingly disabled white man raping a black girl from behind, in the wilderness, while standing up with his wooden leg and sword and of a white boy peeping into the vagina of a black woman with a telescope. These images might symbolize the way men tended to treat black women: as insignificant objects to fulfill their pleasures and curiosity.
Most of Walker’s artwork was purely made from black paper cutouts that were then enlarged upon the walls of her exhibition. Most of her images show the evils of white men, as they treated many blacks no better than animals. The irony behind her work is that her message of persisting racism of blacks from whites from the age of slavery to the age of modernism wouldn’t exist without the tangible black shade she made her artwork from. Another interesting aspect of her work was her depiction of white women. She showed white women as either sympathizing for the blacks (as in her black figure of a white woman carrying an African man on her back) or being victims of the blacks’ racial aggressive (as in her black figure of a black man sticking arrows into the vagina of a white woman to stop the root of the white population by preventing its development). Although her artwork showed different aspects of racism through different images, they were mostly similar in that they were all exaggerated. For example, artwork relating to racist stereotypes showed images of genitals that were unnaturally enlarged, artwork relating to interracial rape with black women as the victims showed images of children having sex with other children or even with adults, and artwork relating to black aggression to white women showed unimaginable graphic violence.
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