In a widely shared statement that does double duty as a press release for her current exhibition, Kara Walker says she’s tired—tired of our country’s perennial racism and of the art world’s expectations for her to be an African-American role model. Her new works, however, demonstrate anything but exhaustion.
Walker continues to reinvent her art, yet from her instantly recognizable black-paper silhouettes and her miraculous sugar-covered sphinx at the Domino factory to the current show of collaged drawings executed on the scale of history painting, she’s kept her sights fixed on the violence done by America’s undying devotion to white supremacy.
Like her previous work, Walker’s latest efforts refract American racism through the fever swamp of psychosexual brutality. The overlapping vignettes in The Pool Party of Sardanapalus (after Delacroix, Kienholz) include bikini-clad black girls disemboweling a trussed-up pale male, and a caricatured mammy poking something sharp into the corpulent belly of a Trumplike man. The riotous pyramid of mayhem and death that is Christ’s Entry into Journalism—featuring hillbillies, Frederick Douglass, Klansmen, a goose-stepping Nazi with a Confederate flag and a flapper Salome carrying the head of a black John the Baptist in a hoodie—leads the eye to a lynched man swinging between two black female trapeze artists. Fictional and cartoonish though it may be, Walker’s carnage nonetheless zeros in on dark truths of the national imagination. Role model or not, she’s an artist we need right now.