Art Mon Mar 04 2013

Kara Walker's Silhouettes: Outlining More Than Race Issues of the Past

By Caitlin Bergh

Kara Walker's new installation at The Art Institute of Chicago is as impressive for its visually rich and thought-provoking material as it is for packing itself neatly into a room no bigger than your living room. In the intimate, secluded space of Gallery 293 in the Modern Wing, Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! offers viewers a chance to confront issues of race, gender, and sexuality as historic and enduring phenomena of the human experience.

Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! includes eight silhouettes cut from white and black paper, five large graphite drawings, and forty small mixed-media drawings. Against the rich gray walls of Gallery 293, Walker's white and black paper silhouettes are immediately captivating. The silhouettes portray characters in groups of two or three with cartoon-like simplicity. Walker chooses characters that predominate in our collective imagination of the antebellum South, including slaves, masters, and Southern belles. The silhouettes seem to completely lack detail while simultaneously being completely filled with it. In the character's faces and bodies, we see nothing but blank white or black paper. But along the carefully carved edges of each cutout character, Walker has spared no detail. We see the armpit hair of a man with his arm outstretched, the erect nipples of a woman facing sideways, the fullness of a girl's lower lip, and a drop of urine clinging to the penis of a young boy. This is the most striking thing about Walker's silhouettes: we know practically nothing about the characters, while simultaneously knowing their most intimate details.

It is amazing how easily we sort each other into categories with one glance in our daily lives. White or black. Rich or poor. We see a mere outline of each other and we somehow know all we need to know. Walker's complex silhouettes, however, remind us that we never do. Maybe you try to ignore a homeless woman asking for change, but the color of her frayed shoes stay with you for the rest of the day. That detail reminds you that she is a person with a unique story, rather than just a stereotype. It is this tension that Walker captures--the tension between our desire to never really see each other, and the intimate details that we can't help but see.

Walker's large, graphite drawings, which are interspersed between the silhouettes, set the scene for where these cutout characters might find themselves: a swamp, a battlefield, or a dusty road. The graphite drawings are chaotic and unclear, but simultaneously evocative. They do not depict history, exactly, but rather flashes of historically rich imagery that we are left to interpret. The chaos is confusing, but that seems to be the point. Walker does not allow viewers to have a resolved or finite feeling about race issues that once existed. Rather, we are overwhelmed by the feeling that these scenes of violence are present in our daily lives.

Walker's forty smaller drawings, hanging throughout the room, add the only color to be found in the whole installation, drawing us in with their promises of cheerfulness only to shock us with new images of violence. There is no simplification in this installation. There are no palatable facts or easy answers. There is only deepening complexity about the nature of humanity and the nature of hatred as we turn to face each wall.

Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! is open from Thursday, February 21, 2013-Sunday, August 11, 2013 in Gallery 293 of the Modern Wing at The Art Institute of Chicago (111 S Michigan Ave). Visitor information at artic.edu.

Photos from The Art Institute of Chicago

Follow me on twitter: @caitlinebergh