For this project I viewed the Kara Walker etchings on the fourth floor of the University Center, titled “A Means to an End…A Shadow Drama in Five Acts.” It was created in 1995, and is a series of 5 plates etched that show the silhouettes of a man in a top hat holding a child over a cliff, a man seeming to be nearly fully submerged underwater, a woman running away from the cliff, a small girl on a dog or animal of similar characteristics, and a woman appearing to be breastfeeding a child. Kara Walker was born in 1969, and is “Best known for creating black-and-white silhouette works that invoke themes of African American racial identity” (artsy.net). The piece I viewed for the week is an early piece from her career. The style is very common throughout her career to have silhouetted figures on a white panel, but she often changes the medium to create it. Two 1994 pieces, both labeled as Untitled, are both one panel silhouettes but one is ink on paper, the other is paint on a white panel. One of Kara Walker’s more recent exhibitions was the Marvelous Sugar Baby, which was a statue sculpted from 80 pounds of Domino brand sugar, in the abandoned Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn. The piece was only up for a few months, due to the factory having been bought out and ants eating away at the statue. There were also small statues of “Lolipop Boys” sculpted from molasses, that had literally melted away from the hot summer temperatures.
Privee, Art. “Kara Walker-A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” 17 June 2014. Artsy.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artprivee-kara-walker-a-subtlety-or-the
“Kara Walker,” Artsy, 2017. https://www.artsy.net/artist/kara-walker
