I recently attending the talk with Mr. Als and Ms. Walker at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. I’ve been very lucky to have attending a few exhibits of Ms. Walkers provocative use of paper and video to comment on being a black woman in America. Every time I see her images it makes me examine my motivations. Am I a slave to American culture? What is being a Black woman? What defines me? She makes me think of this and so much more. Her black experience and how it’s enfleunced her life and career choices fill me with such strong emotions. Sometimes it makes me laugh, sometimes it makes me sad and even feel trapped by family and society’s expectations. I truly respect her abilities as an artist who has created a path of her own. I know she’s a black female artist but to me I just think of her as an artist who doesn’t need any label to get her ideas out to the public.
UCLA Hammer has one piece in their collection for display but if you are in NYC she has a exhibit called ‘Dust Jackets for the Niggerati at Sikkema Jenkins Gallery.
HILTON ALS & KARA WALKER
Hilton Als is a theater critic for the New Yorker and the author of Women and Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis. He received a Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing in 2000 and has taught at Smith College, Wesleyan, and Yale University. In 2010 he co-curated Self-Consciousness at the Veneklasen Werner Gallery in Berlin. Artist Kara Walker is known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. In 2007 the major survey exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love premiered at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, before traveling to several venues, including the Hammer. Walker was also the first artist to be featured in the museum’s Hammer Projects series in 1999.
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