Kara Walker’s Untitled (Cannisters), 1997 is an edition the artist made on the occasion her first museum solo exhibition held concurrently at the Renaissance Society. The artist’s now iconic cut-out silhouettes, a popular artform of the 19th century, depicting racist stereotypes appear here etched in glass surfaces of domestic vessels, fabricated by National Engravers in Naperville, IL. The format acknowledges the visual culture of bygone Americana, known today for perpetuating the racist stereotypes that Walker’s work imbues with new power.
As articulated by the exhibition’s curator, Hamza Walker: “Poetic, political, personal and perverse, Walker’s work does not explore but explodes American history through the lens of race and sexuality.”
Kara Walker (b. 1969; Stockton, CA) is a New York-based artist who works across mediums–installation, sculpture, painting, printmaking–whose work reclaims histories of the atrocities of slavery, racialized violence, and corresponding mythologies of American freedom as a means to fundamental truths about human nature, the history of the United States, and the ways the nation’s narratives of the past figure into its present.
