The American Artist

Kara Walker’s triumphant new show is the best art made about this country in this century.

- Jerry Saltz

JAMES BALDWIN ONCE SAID that “no true account really of black life can be held, can be contained, in the American vocabulary.” Kara Walker’s devastating new exhibition suggests that such an account might be given visibly. Or at least that Walker is coming close. Witness her mad Boschian American Babylon of race, irredeemable evil, barbarity, hatred, demons, white people self-cretinizing, lynchings, dominance,submission, rage, modern Black Power figures, shuffling black cleaning ladies, beneficent whites, Civil War soldiers, plantation owners drawn and quartered by rebellious slaves, pickaninnies and Sambos sexually servicing white masters or being castrated. See also the artist herself, passive, being fucked. Taken together, this show is as terrifyingly beautiful as Goya’s masterpiece of Saturn devouring his children, a shadow of something as dark and mysterious as Melville’s Pequod.

It is not, and should not be, a surprise that Walker has achieved something this monstrously magnificent. I’ve written on Walker since 1994, the year I was thunderstruck when I saw her student work at risd—a drawing, rendered in chocolate, of a “white” child trying to wash the color off a “black” child. Immediately, I saw a coming avenging angel. Beginning with the cut-paper silhouette mural she exhibited at the Drawing Center that same year, which also focused on historical brutality and ugliness, Walker has been exactly that. And has also been attacked by established artists of color who said—and still say!— she’d gone too far, making artworks they felt were a disservice to their political cause. Since then, she’s only gotten better, braver, stronger, more skilled, fearless.