SOURCE: Ward, Allison Hewitt. “Kara Walker and the New History Painting.” The Brooklyn Rail. Accessed October 14, 2017.
QUOTE: “History isn’t a flowing river: it’s a stinking swamp—a mess of body fluids and parts and organs and cruelty and failure.”
The Brooklyn Rail’s article discusses Kara Walker, a black artisit showing at the Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Gallery in New York. The article breaks down modern art and Kara’s artisitic style that defies the gentle storyteling of racism in America’s histoy. Kara chooses to depict African Americans from the past and present all on the same plane. The decision to create work where events are on the same planes illustrates history woven and repeated throughout the years of slavery, jazz age and the past four centuries, this idea is stated in the article, “History isn’t a flowing river: it’s a stinking swamp—a mess of body fluids and parts and organs and cruelty and failure.”
In Kara Walker’s, “Christ’s Entry to Journalism”, she uses ink and paper to depict the range of time periods in black culture with figures from the jazz age, slave era and present era intertwined by including, “slaves, klansmen and contemporary riot police”. Kara’s illustration of the varieties of African Americans both experiencing excitement and pain represent her idea of scattered history.
Although Walker’s stance on creating pieces that present the harsh and forgotten history of African Americans, her synchronizing inclusion of the pain and the fortune can be interpreted as “cynicism and despair” and ignores the progress that has occured since.
