The New Yorker Radio Hour - Kara Walker Talks with Thelma Golden

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Kara Walker is one of our most influential living artists. Walker won a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” grant) before she turned thirty, and became well known for her silhouettes, works constructed from cut black paper using a technique that refers to craft forms of the Victorian era. Walker has put modest materials to work to address very large concerns: the lived experience and historical legacy of American slavery. Though she often depicts the racial and sexual violence that went largely unspoken for centuries in the past, her work is aimed squarely at the modern world. “What I set out to do, in a way, worked too well,” she said, “which was to say, if I pretty everything up with hoop skirts and Southern belles then nobody will recognize that I’m talking about them. And then they didn’t! They said, ‘The past is so bad.’ But I’m not from the past. . . . I do live here now. And so do you.” Walker was interviewed at The New Yorker Festival by Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When creative time, a public art organization, decided to place an exhibit inside the domino sugar refinery, it tapped artist Kara Walker. When she saw this 30,000 square foot space, she decided to reach into the building's past. Since coming to prominence, the artist Kara Walker has a lot of the artist. asked us to deal with some of the most insidious parts of our history. Walker became famous with paper cutouts in a style that seemed Victorian. She borrowed racist imagery from a past century to explore race, gender, violence, and power in our own time. But while the imagery may be painful,

Walker's work is also seductive, beautifully realized in forms that are uniquely her own. She joined us last week at the New Yorker Festival for a conversation with film. Melma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. They discussed a work from a few years back, truly one of a kind with the title, A Subtelty, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. It's a sphinx made in sugar constructed in a former sugar plan in Brooklyn. It was 75 feet long, really monumental. And as the sugar fermented, the smell also became monumental. The line to see the work was sometimes hours long. Here's Thelma Golden with Kara Walker.

So the marvelous sugar baby very much seems to be a work on one hand which calls into a moment that I think you have been in for some years, which is really intersects with the conversation in this moment about monument making. So that your work seem to be in some ways responding to the effort towards monument, but in the effort towards monument, but in. many ways creating a corrective in them. But also, a subtlety also feels as if it's a work that really also talks about this relationship that you have through your work with audience. So could you talk a bit about that work in process as it relates to its form but also its reception? Yeah, I mean, the process was arduous. It was long. My brain doesn't work the way I want it to, when I need it to do things. There's drawing, there's crying, there's reading, there's writing, and there's making PowerPoints that confuse people that help my mind

sort of accumulate images and ideas and feelings. And ultimately, I realize, okay, it is really about the public. It is about creating a space that, you know, where I can, you know, sort of take these ideas about slavery, about the new world, about sugar, about the thousand years prior to the new world's discovery where sugar was a refined, you know, treat for only the most special, you know, a very hard to get treat, all the way into the sort of economics of slavery, the hardships of the sugar plantation, the botany of the, the sugar cane, you know, and how to distill that or literally refine it into something that is iconic and easily digestible, but also speaks about the sort of destruction of humanity

that this beautiful substance, tasty substance has come to represent and has come to be. And I thought, well, I actually have to think like the Habemeyer brothers, you know, I actually have to think about like I have a sugar refinery. How do I entice, you know, and repel at once? So, yeah, ultimately I started thinking about the sphinx. So I started thinking about tourist attractions. I started thinking about ruins and ruins and ruins and past civilizations. And that this place, this plant was about to be destroyed.

It was emblematic of a past civilization, civilization that we are soon no longer to be a part of. And you spent some time there watching the audience engaged in that war. Yeah, yeah. It was a big audience. I think they had 130,000 people over six weekends or something crazy lines. And I went a few times just to be there and see it because it was the thing to be seen. And I couldn't believe that I was responsible for it.

Because people had so many varied and amazing responses to the work, tears and worship and, you know, selfies and, you know, rudeness and, you know, tasting. And, you know, it was really a sensory experience. Really digging into this idea of monuments, I'd love for you to talk about what it meant to grow up in the literal shadow of stone. Mountain. Well, Stone Mountain just briefly is, you know, we moved from Decatur to Stone Mountain when I was 15, and the first thing that happened was we got a notice, well, an American flag and the notice in our mailbox about the Klan rally down a Memorial Drive. This was in 1985. because the clan at that time still owned a part of the land that Stone Mountain Park is occupied by the park. So at the time that I moved there, I was not really keen on visiting the park, but it was there and it was a destination for, you know, everybody in my school and neighborhood. and it's been this looming, strange, permanent artifact that I've learned more and more about over the last, you know, 25 years, I guess.

You've been making art since you were a child, but I want to know when you thought you were an artist. When did the idea occur to you? Right. I mean, it's funny because I think, yes, I always kind of thought I have my father's a painter. I spent around a lot of time as a child around people who said they were artists, so I just thought it was an artist. But I didn't really realize that I wasn't an artist until I was in graduate school. And I started to sort of, you know, really take stock of my own privilege in a way, the privilege of, you know, being around artists. And I thought, well, I want my work to have

meaning. I want my work to have reach. I want my work to have range. And the work that I was looking at that I really thought that really spoke to me was work that that hit a very hard note, you know, that talked about history, that talk that, you know, the German expressionists for, you know, just the easy example. But there were other artists. I mean, certainly the work in the Black Arts movement, you know, was really going hard at, you know, trying to write the wrongs of, you know, our history and, you know, to really sort of mine, plumb the depths of one's, you know, personal experience, but as it relates to social experience of social history. But I think that I had to grow up into that, you know.

The artist Kara Walker, speaking with Delma Golden, more to come. You, through your imagination and this engagement in history, have created for many an alternative narrative. Right? And so much of your work para for me has been about the way in which you've taken a personal path through an imagining of perhaps the stories we haven't heard or the ways in which perhaps they might not have been told. Can you talk about this role of narrative in your work? Sure. I mean, I think, again, sort of talking about influences and narrative, you know, kind of trying to understand where narratives of black womanhood exist. They're primarily, you know, at least in the past, in the form of, you know, personal slave narratives and narratives of overcoming hardship or trying to overcome hardship. And so the truth, the sort of documentary, the personal documentary, the biography, the autobiography. And within the autobiography, I guess, there's this kind of the problem of audience. In the course of autobiography, you have unsavory elements that maybe an audience of good Christian abolitionists doesn't exactly want to hear.

so then a euphemism becomes key or, you know, a strong euphemism, but a, you know, a key euphemism about, you know, about rape, about perhaps about a kind of strange and complicit feeling, a feeling of complicity that perhaps the narrator is trying to wrestle with, right? How did I wind up in this situation that I was trying to protect my children, you know, or trying to set my children free or whatever. But there's a complexity, I think, to, you know, the experience of a woman in slavery that is harder to narrate. And that space is very interesting,

the space of what's unspoken, what's unsaid, because it is both unsayable and very familiar. You know, just thinking abstractly, that's where the silhouette or sort of as a blank space kind of becomes a representative. of that. And can you talk a little bit about what led you to the silhouette as a form? It was the blank space, really. I was thinking a lot about, you know, part, you know, a part about the blank spaces within

these narratives and thinking about my own sort of heart and sort of the stuff that I'm kind of made up of. I was really thinking about the sort of compression of stereotypes and ideas. and misrepresentations coming from outside of me that were sort of building and thinking, you know, just part of it was an abstraction, part of it was thinking about blackness, thinking about skin, thinking about that being a covering rather than an identity. And of course, you know, I was looking at a lot of historical imagery. I was thinking about identity and I was thinking about my own growth,

but I was also linking it with the sort of identity of America. Like what is its representation? What does it look like? And I thought it also looks like this kind of blank space. You know, in so many ways, you mine, right? The horror of what we know is the legacy of slavery, of racism, the violence of it. Can you talk about that part of your process and your practice, what it means to be mining such a comprehensive? complexity in the work visually and through length and text.

I should be able to talk about it by now, but I think as far as part of the process, there is an aspect that just feels necessary. You know, I think that mining my own depths, I dare say I've been accused in my childhood and other parts of my life. of being too self-relevatory, of, say, seeing the wrong thing in a joking way that is, you know, self-deprecating to a fault or to revealing or revealing in a way that upsets the group.

So I did, I think, at some point, stop talking. and it shows up in the work sometimes without my even realizing it. Well, I think there's a prescience to the work. You know, in the past moment you said, my work is all about the now. And it seems to me that even when your work is cited in these historic moments, that you are often commenting about what happens. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I think that what I set out to do in a way worked too well, just to say, well, if I pretty everything up with hoop skirts and southern bells, then nobody will recognize that I'm talking about them.

And then they didn't. You know, I said, oh, this is the past is so bad. And I'm not from the past, you know, even if I make drawings that, you know, suggest that, you know, this is what I can. could have had access to, you know, like stylistically or something. It's really, it's not the case. I do, I do live here now. And so do you. When I have encountered your drawings, I always think of the amazing Audrey Lord quote, which she said of herself, I am my best work, a series of roadmaps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines. It feels to me your drawing practice. is somehow embedded and engaged in that idea, that it forms the connective tissue between

past work and present work. Can you talk specifically about this moment of lockdown and then the ongoing period and what that is meant for your work and particularly your drawing practice? Yeah. I mean, drawing is, it's important to me just to know that I exist. I think it's a connective, it is the connective tissue between. my mind and, you know, my feeling, my heart and the outside, you know, being able to sort of put it down on paper is really something that I feel is, you know, a blessing, a privilege and, you know,

and also a burden and a chore, you know, to have to, you know, remember to do it and, you know, not forget. And it's shocking and it surprises me every time that, you know, when the drawing feels good to me that I didn't have a thought. I didn't know that it was what was coming, but it makes perfect sense. So I've been doing a lot of sitting down, just very kind of basic, nice sheet of paper, pencils, watercolors, maybe some ink. And that's been keeping me going through this period of lockdown, through a lot of ups and downs, you know, emotionally, a lot of some losses and tragedies, some pipe points here and there. It's like the through line for me is being able to sit at my table,

wherever my table happens to be, you know, and do some drawings. The artist Kara Walker speaking with Felma Golden of the Studio Museum. Walker's work is on exhibit in Chicago at the Disable Museum. Their conversation was recorded at, at the New Yorker Festival, which is still going on. You can find out more at new yorker.com slash festival. That's our program for today. I'm David Remnick.

Thank you for joining us. Hope you have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour

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