An A student in the two of my philosophy classes she chose to take at the Atlanta College of Art: Aesthetics and Ideas in Film, Kara wrote a paper and made a presentation on Peter Greenaway. She became a friend and was the best dancer at the Winter Solstice party Dar, Bill Curtis, and I hosted on North Avenue in 1991. She's had art shows all over the world from the Museum of Modern Art to the 2002 São Paulo Biennial to the current show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.

Now Time Magazine ranks her #21 among the 100 most influential people in the art and entertainment world:

Wednesday, May. 02, 2007

21 of 100

Michele Asselin / Corbis Outline

Kara Walker

Kara Walker

By Barbara Kruger

Artists are vigilant. But it's not the vigilance of surveillance. They don't dictate what is worn, thought, spoken and dreamed. Instead, theirs is a vigilance fueled by a heady mix of doubt, disbelief and hope. Few have managed to capture the collision between past and present, between histories and horror stories, between sexuality and shame, between skin and meat, as powerfully and provocatively as Kara Walker, 37.

Walker's vigilance has produced a compelling reckoning with the twisted trajectories of race in America. Her installations and films forcefully pluralize our notion of a singular "history." They create a profusion of backstories and revisions that slash and burn through the pieties of patriotism and the glosses of "color blindness." Restarting the engines of seemingly archaic methods, from the graphic affect of silhouette portraits to the machine-age ethos of film, she produces a cast of characters and caricatures with appetites for destruction and reproduction, for power and sex. She raucously engages both the broad sweep of the big picture and the eloquence of the telling detail. She plays with stereotypes, turning them upside down, spread-eagle and inside out. She revels in cruelty and laughter. Platitudes sicken her. She is brave. Her silhouettes throw themselves against the wall and don't blink.

Kruger is an artist who works with pictures and words

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1595332_1616818,00.html



Keep dancing, Kara


Jack