Kara Walker Quotes

Sugar crystallizes something in our American soul. It is emblematic of all industrial processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White being equated with pure and ‘true’: it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.

I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.

My work is really abject and self-effacing sometimes. I mean, it’s big and overwrought, but it’s just paper dolls, and it’s kind of silly.

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

I’m a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t really know what it was I wanted to say.

To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what’s not working and challenge it. You riff on things.

There was a manifesto in the late ’60s/early ’70s, and it basically laid out what ‘black art’ was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules – I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.

I took a political stance early on, but I don’t think my work is overtly political. I respond to events.

I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things – genre paintings, historical paintings – the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected… that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not.

I trust my hand. If I go into a space with a roll of paper, I can make a work, some kind of work, and feel pretty satisfied.

The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us – viewer and maker – in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.

I am performing this role of the artist and this role of the ‘negress’ coming into a white-box institution. It’s kind of a self-appointed role: the self-designated negress.

I don’t think that my work is very moralistic – at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonising tendency, and I don’t think visual work operates like that.

I’m fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There’s something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

There is something very strange and unsettling for me about making a work that doesn’t fit with what’s the norm or what’s acceptable. There’s something both liberating about it and challenging. I can imagine it doing more harm than good.

Once you open up the Pandora’s box of race and gender… you’re never done.

Humor’s always been the problem of my work, hasn’t it? When working, I feel satisfied when I surprise myself. And when I surprise myself, I wind up laughing.

I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, ‘She’s on our side.’ These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn’t have to deal with.

As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win – or just not be so sad!

I’ve seen people glaze over when they’re confronted with racism, and there’s nothing more, you know, damning and demeaning to having any kind of ideology than people just walking the walk and saying what they’re supposed to say and nodding, and nobody feels anything.

I know that in my family there are histories of violence that are internal family things and that are oftentimes dealt with internally. By internally, I mean inside the family group, but also partly inside ourselves. You know, self-hatred and hostility and rage and this cycle that won’t break.

I have no interest in making a work that doesn’t elicit a feeling.