Kara Walker produced the first masterpiece of the social-media age, but she doesn’t give a damn about likes. Screw millennial obsessions with self-care and safe spaces—Walker wants your discomfort. In her blistering, beautiful first show in New York since her now iconic “Sugar Sphinx” mammy stormed Instagram feeds, in 2014, Walker returns to her first medium, drawing, to demand a reckoning with the ugly history and ongoing repercussions of slavery.
It’s not breaking news that Walker’s images can be so brutal in their depictions of violence and sex that Quentin Tarantino looks like Mister Rogers by comparison. What is new is her approach, which combines collage, oil stick, and sumi ink in works whose ambition and scale are in direct dialogue with centuries of art-historical titans. (One twelve-foot-long piece alone combines references to Edward Kienholz’s 1969 sculpture about lynching, “Five Car Stud,” and Delacroix’s 1827 painting “The Death of Sardanapalus”; both works, like Walker’s own output of the past twenty years, stirred major controversies in their day.) The atrocities of Goya’s “Black Paintings” inevitably come to mind in the show, but so do the atrocities of last month in Charlottesville. In a first, Walker brings explicit allusions to current events into her pictures—from Trump and Ku Klux Klan goons to Trayvon Martin and riot-gear-clad police. The effect is that of the ghosts of future evil haunting the fresh hells of Walker’s more familiar, but no less ghoulish, antebellum cast of characters.
Before Walker’s new show had even opened, at the Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery, the hyperbole-besotted art critic Jerry Saltz proclaimed it to contain “perhaps the greatest work about America made in the twenty-first century.” (His wife, the Times’ co-chief art critic Roberta Smith, was more restrained in her coverage but no less impressed.) Meanwhile, Walker had all but predicted the ballyhoo a few weeks ago, when the gallery released the show’s title. It’s a brilliant self-mythologizing, sycophant-mocking, scold-scalding piece of writing, which begins, “SIKKEMA JENKINS AND CO. IS COMPELLED TO PRESENT THE MOST ASTOUNDING AND IMPORTANT PAINTING SHOW OF THE FALL VIEWING SEASON!” The carnival-barker-like text had a B-side, an artist’s statement written in Walker’s own voice, in which she wearily reminded her readers that she’s nobody’s role model. The bad news for Walker is that, like it or not, she remains one of our most fearless artists.
