Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in United States
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

The first full-scale American museum survey of the work of artist Kara Walker features works ranging from her signature black-paper silhouettes to film animations to more than 100 works on paper.

Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained national and international recognition for her room-size tableaux depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation but made using the genteel 18th-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the American South before the Civil War, Walker’s compositions play off stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters and mistresses and slave men, women, and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation.

After its presentation at the Whitney, the exhibition will travel to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (February 17–May 11, 2008).