Pea, ball, bounce

Interview, Nov, 1998 by James Hannaham

KW: Yes.

JH: How did it happen? Were you just drinking coffee?

KW: I ran across this poem listing all these delicious associations with the black body with all these lines about "the ginger-colored Negroes," et cetera. I think it was a Harlem Renaissance poet. So at one point I was writing about all of these desires to be consumed, paired with the intoxicating power of badness. Everyone loves chocolate but no one wants to eat too much of it. Everyone loves coffee but you know what happens if you drink too much.

JH: To what extent is shock value important to you?

KW: When I started to work, of course, I was in a mostly lily-white school. It never really occurred to me that the work was shocking. [laughs] I guess it's probably not so much the lily-white thing, just the art school, the whole context. Everyone is trying to push something, so you get caught up in that mode of working.

JH: When was it first pointed out to you?

KW: I guess people would be sort of reserved and say, "Well, you know, If I were somebody else this might shock me." Often I'll be surprised at even what I could think, self-righteous goody-two-shoes that I am.

JH: It's always been kind of interesting that people call your work explicit, even though there's a level of abstraction at the same time. It suggests just enough so you can fill in the rest of it with your own dirty mind.

KW: Right, which was the thrilling part about discovering silhouette in the first place. Because I was doing that anyway, looking at just ordinary Colonial portraits of people and thinking, Ohhh, they just want to be black. I had been looking at a European take on Africans and African-Americans in the last couple of centuries -

JH: Yeah? So how's your husband?

KW: [laughs]

JH: Sorry, I couldn't resist. But I did have a question about that. What do you say to people who try to call you out as an Oreo for having married a German man?

KW: People are too polite to actually do that these days. They think it. And I know they think it, but it always gets more complicated. It's such a shame. Years ago, I had a friend who was looking at some of my work, and just as an aside commented to me, "I don't think white people have souls." Meanwhile, I'm thinking about this great new guy I just started dating.

JH: Have you and Uncle Larry ever had a serious heart-to-heart about making art?

KW: Not really. You know the way the Walkers talk. Actually, here's what's happened. There was this article I told you about earlier in The International Review of African American Art and they invited a response. l got a note that was given to my dad by somebody else in Atlanta, so I wouldn't have even seen the magazine if they hadn't slipped this note to him, but it said, "So could you please ask your daughter if she'd like to respond?" Anyway, my dad also wrote a response. Not only did he defend my right to use the imagery that I want to use, he said he considered it a right that he and his generation had fought to give me. It was pretty dam nice of him. We haven't heard anything from that magazine since.