Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr

Kara Walker (*1969) is one of the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained national and international recognition for her room-filling tableaux depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation, but made using the genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projection, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. This exceptional publication features critical essays on the myriad social, racial, and gender issues present in Walker’s work as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations. A thirty-six-page visual essay was created especially for this book by the artist.