Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!

Unsettling and provocative, Kara Walker's art takes hold. With room-size assemblages of black cut-paper silhouettes, eerie video animations, and a rich body of paintings, prints, and drawings—all circling around America's enduring conundrums of race, sex, and violence—Walker taps straight into our cultural subconscious, excavates our national history, and reflects it back to us with an array of complexities and contradictions.

Walker rocketed to fame at an early age. Barely out of art school, she scored a sensational success with 1994's Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart—a work, now in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, that drew on the 18th-century tradition of cut-paper silhouette to present caricatures of antebellum figures in violent and erotic scenarios. Proclaiming a new kind of history painting, Gone steered American art into a daring confrontation of our plantation era. Then, just three years later, when she was 28, she received a MacArthur Fellowship, one of the so-called genius grants. Ever since, she has been at the forefront of the international art world, challenging her audiences to continually, and imaginatively, reconsider America's history.

Join us for a conversation with Walker and Lisa Dorin, The Art Institute of Chicago's associate curator of contemporary art, followed by an exclusive preview of Walker's new installation Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! in the Art Institute's Modern Wing.

View more images of Kara Walker's work through her website.

This program is presented in partnership with the Leadership Advisory Committee and the Department of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. The installation is supported by a gift to the Art Institute of Chicago from Liz and Eric Lefkofsky.