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Kara Walker

In her diverse practice, Kara Walker riffs on contemporary and historical mythologies of race, gender, sexuality, slavery, and violence. She rose to prominence with darkly funny large-scale drawings and silhouetted depictions of angst and aggression in the Antebellum South. In recent years, Walker has gained renown for colossal, discomfiting public artworks. In 2014, she unveiled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014) at Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory. The 35-by-75-foot sculpture resembled a Black “mammy” figure posed as a sphinx and covered in white sugar. In 2019 at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Walker installed a four-tiered fountain, Fons Americanus (2019), which served as a subversive monument to the transatlantic slave trade. Walker has won the Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship from United States Artists and been named a MacArthur Fellow. She was selected as the director and set and costume designer for a special project at the 2015 Venice Biennale.