Like most outstanding artists, Kara Walker is unrelenting. In a press statement for her latest show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., she wrote in her familiar, mock-serious yet dead-serious tone that she was “tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model’ ” and of “being a featured member of my racial group and/or gender niche.” But Ms. Walker’s desire to stand down from the demands of her particular brand of fame has not made her stand down in her art, which is as disturbing and challenging as ever, if not more so.
Honing more insistently to her longtime theme — the bitter legacy of slavery in the United States — the works in this assured exhibition unequivocally enter new territory. Narratively, they land solidly where Ms. Walker has only lightly tread: the remorseless, racialized American present, which is suffused with the death rattle of white male domination and its multiple bigotries. Visually they find the artist returning fully to two dimensions after her triumphal public sculpture, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” the monumental and vexatious sugarcoated woman-sphinx of 2014. Now she is pushing with new rigor at the boundaries of her primary medium and material — drawing and paper — merging collage, political cartoon and history painting, and this gives her story line more force.
The show is a brawl of works on paper that has as much the feeling of a studio visit as an exhibition. Coming in various shapes and sizes — worked with Sumi ink, charcoal or watercolor — the paper is cut, torn and collaged, sometimes to canvas or raw linen the shade of tobacco, often with quantities of black paint and sometimes bits of color.
The show’s centerpiece is the enormous “Christ’s Entry into Journalism” (2017) an 11 by 18 foot collage crowded with over 80 ink drawings of heads and figures. Its title echoes numerous historical depictions of “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” the biblical event preceding his betrayal, trial, death and resurrection; but perhaps journalism’s death and resurrection is the main point. The images here are not exclusively contemporary — note a man resembling the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the lower left corner — but they implicate current events. Across the top of the piece a rebus depicts a rope salesman, a white farmer with a noose, a lynched figure and a Ku Klux Klan member whose parted robe reveals a figure in a suit and an extra-long tie who could be construed as the current occupant of the White House.
More prominent images evoke Civil Rights protesters; a Confederate flag and an arm raised in a Nazi salute; a policeman in riot gear pursuing a protester with a turkey leg and a cellphone; and Batman, carrying a figure wrapped as a mummy whose swollen black face may or may not refer to Emmett Till. At the center, a bare-chested black man raises his chained hands prayerfully. Nearby the severed head of a young black man in a hoodie is seen, upright, on a tray carried by a white woman, like Salome with the head of John the Baptist. More than ever, Ms. Walker’s work piles personages, events and possible interpretations before us, daring us to face her reality — and ours.
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Ms. Walker emerged in the mid-1990s with incendiary works set adamantly and slyly in the past that were frequently criticized as politically incorrect for caricaturing slavery in the antebellum South. Scaling up the demure 19th-century genre of the black-paper silhouette, she brought to elegant, repellent life an unending stream of vicious master-slave narratives — a continuum of violence, abuse and violation that consumed and corrupted almost all parties, regardless of age or race. Antic, profane and riveting, these mural-like scenes replayed history as farce and masqueraded tragedy as depraved comedy. They revealed the inevitable psychic corruption of humans owning humans, brought out the sexual component of oppression in any form and implied a country still shaped by the original sin of slavery.
Ms. Walker’s visual efforts have generally been aided by a sardonic ventriloquism that recycles 19th-century elocutions. The title of her current show runs 198 words and unspools in the cadences of a sideshow barker: “Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to Present the Most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!.” And so on, as if to account for all possible reactions: “Collectors of Fine Art will Flock…,” “Scholars will Study and Debate…,” “Art historians will wonder…,” “Critics will shake their heads...” “The Final President of the United States will visibly wince.” One sentence is especially telling: “Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media.” Ms. Walker knows that with artistic reputation, what goes up must come down. She also knows that political correctness has returned, with various factions of the righteous trying to dictate what artists and museums should and should not show. (Consider the recent examples of Dana Schutz at the Whitney Biennial and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Sam Durant at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.)
Ms. Walker’s work might be seen as a three-pronged attempt to wreak havoc with racism, language — and drawing itself. Her signature black silhouettes, which have transferred well to printmaking, book illustrations and animated films, reappear, and Ms. Walker sometimes struggles to refresh them. She succeeds in “Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might be Guilty of Something),” where the black silhouette cutouts migrate to a large, seemingly whitewashed slab of canvas.
But she really cuts loose with the big collages and their rough-edged images, which recur in two other large collages, “U.S.A. Idioms” and “The Pool Party of Sardanapalus (after Delacroix, Kienholz).” Measuring some 10 by 11 feet, this last work is notable for a group of young black women in two-piece bathing suits; they bring to mind a black teenager at a pool party in McKinney, Tex., who was thrown to the ground and restrained by a white policeman.
By cutting and pasting various images, Ms. Walker is able to convincingly combine not only different times and histories, but also numerous drawing styles, which gives her art a new freedom and toughness that it has needed. Especially tough is a collage-painting titled “Spook,” one of three outstanding raw linen works. Placed near the gallery’s front door, it centers on a cut-out ink drawing of a black woman pleasuring herself in a dark woodland haunted by cutouts that contrast various threats: a snake, a bat, a white man with a noose. The surface is thick with tenderly applied black paint.
A different kind of combination of sensuous and tough is achieved in “Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit),” a triptych in which an assortment of figures, some pale as ghosts, sink into a vast black swamp beneath black trees. It is both morbid and mordant and contains some of Ms. Walker’s most ravishing ink drawing. Other works seem almost tossed off. A poignant example is an all-black oval canvas titled “Storm Ryder” and collaged with pieces of torn paper. One scrap gives a glimpse of a storm-tossed ship reminiscent of Albert Pinkham Ryder. Others convey the wise words of the subtitle: “You Must Hate Black People as Much as You Hate Yourself.” She seems to be saying that bigotry starts with unexamined self-hatred.
In her press statement, Ms. Walker claimed that her latest efforts — all made during this excruciating summer — form a show that is “not exhaustive, activist or comprehensive in any way.” Maybe not. But the exhibition reveals a crossroads in her great career and she sails right through, from strength to new strength.
