My Complement, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love

Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2007. First edition. Hardcover. New in publisher's shrink wrap. Lg. 8vo. Light brown cloth, stamped in dark brown on covers and spine. Publisher's vertical paper band on front cover. Illustrated with more than 200 full-color images. About the exhibition:

"The first full-scale American museum survey of the work of artist Kara Walker premieres at the Walker Art Center February 17-May 13, 2007. Organized by Philippe Vergne, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and Yasmil Raymond, Assistant Curator, at the Walker, in close collaboration with the artist, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love features works ranging from her signature black-paper silhouettes to film animations to more than 100 works on paper. After its presentation at the Walker, the exhibition will travel to the ARC/Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (June 20 - September 9, 2007), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (October 11, 2007-February 3, 2008), and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (February 17-May 11, 2008).

Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained national and international recognition for her room-size tableaux depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation but made using the genteel 18th-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the American South before the Civil War, Walker's compositions play off stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters and mistresses and slave men, women, and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation.

Over the years the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression, and liberation. Walker's scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Her work leads viewers through an aesthetic experience that evokes a critical understanding of the past and proposes an examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes." - Publisher.