Kara Walker’s Latest Show: Racist Fantasies
For her latest exhibition, Kara Walker draws upon two white supremacist texts from the twentieth century, building a breadth of work that centers pointedly on the present moment. The show is titled after a line in Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams of My Father,” and presents five sweeping graphite drawings and forty mixed-media works that image racist fantasies, providing an indictment of the way these drive contemporary politics and culture. The show also marks a return to her seminal cut-paper silhouettes, which polarized the art world when she debuted them at the Drawing Center in 1994 and have been peripheral to her practice for a number of years. “Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!†is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through August 11, 2013. Walker writes about her work here.
