Pea, ball, bounce

Interview, Nov, 1998 by James Hannaham

My first encounter with the work of artist Kara Walker was when her father, Atlanta-based painter Larry Walker, visited my childhood home and told a story about her habit of picking peas up from the plate balanced on her high chair and exclaiming "Pea . . . ball . . . bounce!" before throwing them at the floor. Let's Just say I've known my cousin a long time. And while other artists her age are still essentially tossing legumes from their baby seats, Kara, twenty-eight, has whizzed her stroller through the American art world in the past couple of years, grabbing a spot at the most recent Whitney Biennial (where her parents, embarrassingly, handed out pins to all her relatives that said "Kara's aunt," "Kara's husband," and so on) and a 1997 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. In the meantime, her silhouettes depicting scenes of sex and violence in an antebellum South both historical and hysterical generated controversy from all sides (for instance, some critics accused her of merely reinforcing black stereotypes) and sold faster than she could slice them. In the middle of this, Walker somehow found time to get married to jewelry designer Klaus Burgel and push around someone else's stroller - that of her one-year-old daughter Octavia. From October 22 to November 28, she'll have her first New York showing at Wooster Gardens - of silhouettes, drawings, and installations - in the two years since she was elected the art world's New Negro.

JAMES HANNAHAM: Are you sick of silhouettes?

KARA WALKER: Sort of. I'm actually cutting some right now because after all this talk about negative black stereotyping in my work I thought I would take on positive black stereotyping. You know, images that are uplifting to the point of absurdity? That kind of bizarre Africanism that populates people's homes.

JH: Right, right. The author Tim Murphy gave me a birthday card with a painting of this very regal-looking but clumsily rendered African queen on it. The caption says the artist's work is meant to "release the hidden cultural beauty of the Afro-American." As if it was a given that that beauty was hidden.

KW: Exactly. I did this painting that was loosely inspired by a relatively famous picture of the poet Phyllis Wheatley. The central figure is a terse black woman rolling her eyes back in her head as she contemplates whatever poets contemplate, with her hand under her chin. Over her right shoulder is a sort of cartoonish pickaninny in chains, and she's angry and pointing accusingly at the woman. Over her left shoulder is a doughy white would-be master with an impressive dick. It's called "Portrait of the Artist Wrestling With Her Demons."

JH: Now what inspires an image like that?

KW: OK. I'll try to make some kind of general statement. But it gets so sappy and simple when I have to break it down like that. You know, sometimes I've lived my life completely oblivious to racism in its various forms, in the sense where not only was it a surprise to me to find it coming from others, but I've even found myself living out the expectations of whites to the horror of blacks.

JH: Is this before high school, when you lived in California?

KW: No. Probably more in Georgia, where sometimes simply hanging around with whites was bad enough to incite people. I think I sort of went through a realization, after spending a lot of time hanging around with people who had absolutely no respect for me as a human being and worshiping them. Or, you know, getting involved in relationships with men, which is a much more intense dynamic. There are times when you're friends with somebody or you're having a relationship, and you're not thinking about race for a brief moment. Then suddenly the entire history of the whole United States of America or the American South or post-Reconstruction comes crashing down on you and you say to yourself, "Hmm, this reminds me of something. I'm not sure what it is, but it's vaguely familiar."

JH: Wasn't there some incident in high school where somebody put a note on your car?

KW: At some point in Atlanta, I was with my then boyfriend, John, in the park, thinking we were alone, but when we got back to the car there was a flyer from the Ku Klux Klan, spelling out for him all the evils of black women, describing what sort of peril he was in, and identifying stereotypes of disease and moral degradation. That was an awakening for naive me. So I guess I needed a way to question how these types of issues have been represented in art previously.

JH: Is that when you started dealing with Issues of race in your work?

KW: At the beginning of the story, I really avoided making any statement about race in the work, and I think I did that because of the environment I was in, and what other black people at the Atlanta College of Art, where I got my B.A., were doing. There was an essentialist rhetoric in their work that I thought wasn't right for me because for some strange reason I didn't take it seriously enough. That approach was too righteous to question itself.