The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us – viewer and maker – in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss. – Kara Walker
I trust my hand. If I go into a space with a roll of paper, I can make a work, some kind of work, and feel pretty satisfied. – Kara Walker
I don’t know how much I believe in redemptive stories, even though people want them and strive for them. – Kara Walker
Humor’s always been the problem of my work, hasn’t it? When working, I feel satisfied when I surprise myself. And when I surprise myself, I wind up laughing. – Kara Walker
I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things – genre paintings, historical paintings – the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society. – Kara Walker
I know that in my family there are histories of violence that are internal family things and that are oftentimes dealt with internally. By internally, I mean inside the family group, but also partly inside ourselves. You know, self-hatred and hostility and rage and this cycle that won’t break. – Kara Walker
There was a manifesto in the late ’60s/early ’70s, and it basically laid out what ‘black art’ was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules – I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists. – Kara Walker
A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected… that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time. – Kara Walker
Sugar crystallizes something in our American soul. It is emblematic of all industrial processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White being equated with pure and ‘true’: it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure. – Kara Walker
I’m fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There’s something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth. – Kara Walker
I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, ‘She’s on our side.’ These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn’t have to deal with. – Kara Walker
I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels. – Kara Walker
I took a political stance early on, but I don’t think my work is overtly political. I respond to events. – Kara Walker
Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not. – Kara Walker
I’ve seen people glaze over when they’re confronted with racism, and there’s nothing more, you know, damning and demeaning to having any kind of ideology than people just walking the walk and saying what they’re supposed to say and nodding, and nobody feels anything. – Kara Walker
To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what’s not working and challenge it. You riff on things. – Kara Walker
I don’t think that my work is very moralistic – at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonising tendency, and I don’t think visual work operates like that. – Kara Walker
My work is really abject and self-effacing sometimes. I mean, it’s big and overwrought, but it’s just paper dolls, and it’s kind of silly. – Kara Walker
I grew up partially around Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in that part of the country, there was always this aura of mythology and palpable sense of otherness about being a Southerner. – Kara Walker
The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else. – Kara Walker
I am performing this role of the artist and this role of the ‘negress’ coming into a white-box institution. It’s kind of a self-appointed role: the self-designated negress. – Kara Walker
