Pack-Mules in the Mountains, from Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

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.