My Enemy? or My Friend? The Walker's know their sh...

Take a look at Kara Walkers new exhibit: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
This show features a retrospective of Kara’s work that includes work as recent as 2006 and as old as 1994.

You can see the growth in her new works and it explodes into the backdrops of women and abuse of women. WOW is how I felt observing her new forks that are displayed in the newest showing that will also exhibit in Los Angeles and London. This new work is enticing to the thoughts of how and why consequences that we address in our own state of being as African Americans but also as a community. The purpose is, in part, to eliminate the exotic nature of difference. Like history itself, it is possible, then, that a single exhibition, a single artwork, can prompt both deep pleasure and sharp pain, depending on each participant’s perspective, disposition, knowledge, and background. It’s all about communication as I so frequently explain to students of mine at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
I am excited to see Kara take a stand on something that is important and needed. "I don't feel anything is moved forward in a conversation about race because it is a conversation about race," Kara says.


Its an ongoing journal, a dialog that’s both needed and ignored in our community. In the Star Tribune newspaper her in Minneapolis Kara says " I come at this work from a whole range of visceral feels, A large part of my work appears in these big institutions and I want it to speak directly to a black, female audience there because I think nobody speaks to them. It's just a complex construction, to be black, and American, and a woman. It's interesting to touch a spot that hasn’t healed in me or in most African American women, I think."

Soft spoken, shy, but walks with a large stick. I also had an opportunity to meet her father, Atlanta-based painter Larry Walker, who has a huge history in art and art history; both as an instructor and artist himself. Her sister Dana Walker is also a fabulous photographer over at the art center, in Pasadena.

This is a remarkable display of an artist growth as a Woman and an African American Artist.