Kara Walker has had enough.
Since her 1994 New York debut, at just 24 years old, at the Drawing Center, she and her artworks have been hailed as “exquisite” “skillful” “ingenious” and “triumphant.” She has won a MacArthur fellowship, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been widely praised as among the most important black artists working today. No pressure or anything.
Ms. Walker is, as she writes in the artist statement for her new show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York, “tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse, ‘being a role model.’ ” She is fed up with “being a featured member of my racial group and/or gender niche.” She also notes that her new work is not “activist” and we shouldn’t expect answers from her: “I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait.”
Well, this is what Ms. Walker rolling her eyes and folding her arms looks like: a 151-by-191-inch work at the show, in sumi ink and collage, titled “Christ’s Entry Into Journalism,” which combines the imagined and the real as well as the past and present. My eye immediately went to the faces of James Brown and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then I noticed Frederick Douglass giving a Black Power salute while holding the swastika-stamped head of what appears to be Donald Trump — an obvious allusion to the moment, a few months back, when the president seemed to believe Douglass, who died in 1895, was alive.
Elsewhere in the illustration, the president’s look-alike makes another appearance. This time he peeks out from between a Klansman’s legs. The Trump-like character wags his tongue while defecating. In another part of the collage, two black girls swing on a trapeze. Look closer and you see the body of a lynched black man hanging on the branch between them.
A white woman carries Trayvon Martin’s hoodie-covered head on a tray. A black man is attacked by a police officer in riot gear who holds a turkey leg in one hand and a cellphone in the other. There is a Confederate battle flag. An American flag. And an arm in a Nazi salute.
This is just one of her pieces in a show of 22.
While Ms. Walker’s work has always reflected the realities of black America, it has typically focused on the past, particularly the slavery of African-Americans. Never has she so blatantly illustrated the modern.
That is why the dissonance between her canvases and her statement has rubbed many people the wrong way. One person said the statement wasn’t “incredibly innovative or interesting or even resistant.” Another called it “foolish.” Nell Painter, an acclaimed historian-turned-painter, sawa paradox in being “tired of being a role model, but still making art about slavery.” One critic even suggested that if Ms. Walker is sick of her platform, she should “sit down.”
The outrage is tediously predictable — and of a piece with the debate that has flared over the political responsibility of artists and celebrities since the election of Donald Trump. Richard Prince disavowed an image he created of Ivanka Trump years ago and returned the money he got from selling it. In January, the artist Christo abandoned a project he’d worked on for over 20 years because it was on federal land and he couldn’t condone working to the benefit of the current government. Meryl Streep was greeted with hosannas for her outspoken criticism of the president; Taylor Swift’s silence has been condemned.
Ms. Walker gets all this — perhaps better than most, given that her work has long been criticized by prominent artists, black and white, who say it is reductive. In 1997, the black artist Betye Saar led a letter-writing campaign against Ms. Walker’s work, the same year that Howardena Pindell, another black artist, said that Ms. Walker “consciously or unconsciously seems to be catering to the bestial fantasies about blacks created by white supremacy and racism.” Two years later, Ms. Saar said that Ms. Walker’s art was “revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children” and that “it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.” As Ms. Walker wryly put it in an interview with New York magazine in April: “We’re in too much of a celebrity culture, but at least that means I can be a disappointment to others.”
Her finger-wagging critics are missing the point when they go after her artist statement, which is nothing less than a big middle finger to our current culture of flame wars and empty words. Her statement is another way of saying: Ignore the hot air. Open your eyes and look at the work. The work is saying something strong and clear. It said to this viewer that this country is sick and perhaps we congratulated ourselves too much and too early for moving forward. Progress can so quickly crumble into chaos.
If you do open your eyes, you will be schooled by a modern master on American history, racism, aesthetics and politics. It’s far more powerful than any artist statement.
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