KARA WALKER

Kara Walker (b. 1969) is a contemporary African-American artist known for her exploration of race, stereotypes, gender, and identity throughout American history. She is best known for her large-scale tableaux of collaged silhouettes amidst black-and-white pastoral landscapes. Often filled with brutal and harrowing imagery, Walker provocatively illustrates the country's origins of slavery in the antebellum South. Born in Stockton, CA, the artist received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design three years later. Success came just out of school, with Walker becoming one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship at age 28. Influenced by Lorna Simpson and Adrian Piper, Walker continues to engage with feminism and ideals of beauty, as seen in her monumental sugar sculpture A Subtlely... (2014), which portrayed a black woman as a sphinx at the former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. Walker's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others. She currently lives and works in New York, NY.