Facts about Kara Walker
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Her 2019 installation at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles featured a 75-foot-long silhouette narrative addressing the history of slavery and resistance through Walker's characteristic black paper cutouts.
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Walker's 1994 debut solo exhibition at Document gallery in Atlanta featured her early silhouettes that would establish the confrontational aesthetic addressing racial violence and American trauma.
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During her 2013 Venice Biennale participation, Walker presented a series of large-scale drawings and films that solidified her international prominence as a major contemporary artist addressing race and American history.
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Over 500,000 people visited Kara Walker's 2016 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, making it one of the most attended contemporary art exhibitions that year.
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At age 24, Walker presented her first major solo exhibition at the Document gallery in Atlanta in 1994, launching the career that would eventually challenge how American museums approach historical narratives through silhouette art.
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Kara Walker's 2005 work A Subtlety depicted a colossal sphinx made of 80 tons of molasses in a New York City warehouse, creating a monumental site-specific installation that drew over 60,000 visitors.
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Walker's 2014 work Dust Bowls presented 6 large-scale paintings on paper that merged her signature silhouettes with abstract expressionist techniques and gestural mark-making.
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Born in 1969 in Stockton, California, Kara Walker earned her MFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 before gaining international recognition for her silhouette art practice.
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The Guggenheim Museum in New York commissioned Kara Walker in 2006 to create a large-scale public art project that transformed the museum's rotunda with black vinyl silhouettes.
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Kara Walker's 2007 film An Audience featured a 35-minute animated narrative exploring the history of blackface minstrelsy in American entertainment.
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In 1997, Kara Walker created a monumental silhouette installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York that measured approximately 50 feet long.