"You Do" Kara Walker

NEW YORK, NY October 11, 2007 —Slideshow: Kara Walker

Kara Walker at The Whitney Museum of Art

More about Helga Davis here

HOST: This is the voice of Kara Walker – a young artist who’s being celebrated in an exhibition that opens today at the Whitney Museum today

KARA WALKER: Starting this work was a way of stamping my foot in the ground and saying "I am a human being, dammit."

HOST: Kara Walker's one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation. Her works been shown in galleries and museums around the world and she won the prestigious MacArthur Genius Award over ten years ago when she was 27. She employs traditional silhouette drawings, 19th century caricature and shadow puppetry. But instead of innocent fairy tales, she focuses on the Antebellum South and the images and stereotypes that justified slavery. Her art is often gruesome and violent and vividly sexual. Ever since Walker arrived on the art scene, her work has been controversial. Art critic Eleanor Heartney recently wrote about Walker for Art in America.

Heartney: She became the centerpiece in a controversy with older black women artists who felt that she was really degrading and returning these stereotypes to a respectability that they felt they'd spent their careers basically trying to banish from our lexicon.

HOST: But Heartney says Walker is part of a young generation of artists rethinking ideas about representation - that just because an artist makes use of a stereotyped image, doesn't mean they endorse the prejudice behind it.

Heartney: what she's really trying to do is to take those representations that are around us and perhaps shape our reality in ways that we don't want to admit and she wants to undermine them and sort of dig them out from inside. But also just to look at them they're just drop dead gorgeous.

HOST: Kara Walker was born in California and grew up in Georgia. But now, she calls New York home. As the Whitney was preparing to open the exhibition, Kara Walker welcomed WNYC's Helga Davis into her studio, for a casual conversation about her life and work. You can hear Helga Davis each night on Overnight Music on 93.9 WNYC.