One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad’s lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: ‘I want to do that, too,’ and I pretty much decided then and there at age 2½ or 3 that I was an artist just like Dad.

Kara Walker

Categorized in : Memories Artist Dad

The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does.

Kara Walker

information doe littles

There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist.

Kara Walker

doctors education art

Silhouettes are reductions, and racial stereotypes are also reductions of actual human beings.

Kara Walker

silhouettes reduction stereotype

I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful

Kara Walker

beautiful mean art

If you're a Black artist, you could paint a wall of smiley faces, and someone will still ask you, 'Why are you so angry?'

Kara Walker

wall black artist

A lot of my work has been about the unexpected—that kind of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time. That kind of dilemma—that push and pull—is the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make.

Kara Walker

unexpected pieces kind

Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about.

Kara Walker

whiteness blackness mean

I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen knife and some people she'd like to kill

Kara Walker

knives southern people

I don't think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history. I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.

Kara Walker

consumed thinking

I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without the 'struggle?'

Kara Walker

struggle country thinking

Sugar crystallizes something in our American Soul. It is emblematic of all Industrial Processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White Being equated with pure and ‘true’ it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.

Kara Walker

soul white ideas

I have no interest in making a work that doesn't elicit a feeling.

Kara Walker

making feeling interest work

I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.

Kara Walker

make like historical love

The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us - viewer and maker - in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.

Kara Walker

us without space loss

It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.

Kara Walker

i-am game work love

To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what's not working and challenge it. You riff on things.

Kara Walker

challenge look you artist

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

Kara Walker

truth sometimes funny history

There is something very strange and unsettling for me about making a work that doesn't fit with what's the norm or what's acceptable. There's something both liberating about it and challenging. I can imagine it doing more harm than good.

Kara Walker

good me i-can work

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

Kara Walker

illusion work history past

Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.

Kara Walker

never you gender race