Kara Walker & Larry Walker
Kara Walker talks with her father, artist Larry Walker, for BOMB's Oral History Project
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Detail of Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at ‘Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’ (sketches from Plantation Life)” See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause, 1997, Cut paper on wall, 144 x 1,020 inches, 365.76 x 2,590.8 cm. Installation view: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2008. Photo: Joshua White
Elegy for Michael: Passage Through the Valley, Larry Walker, Charcoal w/Collage element (Drawing), 36 x 29 inches, completed 2010.1
Larry Walker So do the kids at Columbia call you Prof?
Kara Walker They call me Kara like I’m their friendly, cool aunt. We can both introduce ourselves. I’m Kara Walker, and I’m talking with my dad who is—
LW—Larry Walker.
KW And we are sitting in his studio/guest room and resource room in Lithonia just outside Atlanta, Georgia. Today’s date is November 29th, 2013.
LW This oral history is for BOMB Magazine.
KW How to begin? I have a few questions and notes for you. I think the gist of this is to get a sense of everything: What it is to be an artist; how you and I got to be doing the things that we’re doing, the similarities and differences. I’m actually kind of interested in the internal stuff in paintings.
LW The audience might also like to hear how you and I started. I remember, when you were very young, and I was teaching at the University of the Pacific in California, you had an interest in art. You would draw on sidewalks.
KW I would draw on the sidewalk outside our home, in Stockton. You gave me the tools to do that. You gave me really nice pastels, not just sidewalk chalk.
LW All children draw at some point in time, but you just continued. I’m wondering what you feel were factors in feeding your interest and feeding that enthusiasm to continue.
KW I think part of it was that you were also doing drawing and painting. There was always a studio in the garage where you worked on paintings when I was growing up. I have very early and very clear memories of sitting on your lap while you were working on drawings and schoolwork for the university. You held me and kept me around. There was a feeling of safety associated with making stuff and I got a good vibe from doing drawings. I think there was also something about materials being available. I have a memory of sitting in my room and trying to make a house of mat board from scraps of framing. (laughter) Part of it was availability and part of it was love and feeling that this was an okay thing. I didn’t realize until much later that pursuing art might be a fraught career choice for most people. It didn’t occur to me at all.
You taught children early on in your art-making career, didn’t you? You did some early childhood work in Detroit.
LW Yeah, I did. That was an interesting time back in the day.
KW What day was that?
LW I graduated with a bachelor of science in art education from Wayne State University (Detroit) in 1958. Upon graduating I landed a job with the Detroit public school system. My first teaching job was at an elementary school with 2100 students.
KW Oh my gosh!
Detail of: Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at ‘Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’ (sketches from Plantation Life)” See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause, 1997, Cut paper on wall, 144 x 1,020 inches, 365.76 x 2,590.8 cm. Installation view: Kara Walker: Mon Ennemi, Mon Frère, Mon Bourreau, Mon Amour, ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2007. Photo: Florian Kleinefenn
LW I was one of two art teachers. Mr. Anthony, the other art teacher, had the third and fourth graders and I had the fifth and sixth graders. Kindergarten through second grade classes were self-contained, so the students stayed with their homeroom teachers. At that time in the Detroit system, third through sixth grade students were in their homeroom class for half the day and the other half of the day they traveled from class to class, for music, math, art, science, and physical education. I had the fifth and sixth graders for one to two periods per week. I had something like fourteen classes per week. One of the interesting challenges was how to maximize the amount of time for art. Because class periods were something like thirty-five to forty minutes per class, I had to come up with a scheme to minimize the amount of time spent on extra stuff like taking attendance and hall duty. I came up with an elaborate system to introduce the democratic process to get kids involved with voting and taking responsibility. We had class chairmen, table captains, and captains for each of the materials most frequently used. Students were nominated for positions and elections were held.
KW Materials like?
LW Crayons, scissors, paintbrushes, paint. Somebody was in charge of each. Almost the entire class had a job to do. Then we had practice sessions and I would time them. In order to pass out paper, the captain had to start at the paper cabinet and go to table one, then table two and so forth, in order. You didn’t pass out paper to each kid at that table. You gave a stack of paper to table one, then moved on to table two, etcetera. In the meantime, the next captain (i.e. paint, water, brushes) would follow at intervals, all starting with table one. Everybody was going in the same direction. Nobody ran into each other. We didn’t have any bumping. Captains had to perform quickly without running. I would time everybody . . . so many seconds to do this or so many to do that. I never really knew how long it took, obviously. I timed them rather loosely, but it worked to get materials and projects passed out and turned in as quickly as possible, which enabled us to spend most of the class time working on art concerns.
All projects were art-oriented, including events and holidays. Christmas, Thanksgiving, you name it. Christmas was a wonderful time to do paper sculpture. We could talk and learn about volume, and we could work with shapes. We could incorporate color and put these things together to make ornaments and things that sat on Christmas trees or hung from the ceilings, whatever. My five years of teaching in the elementary grades were good experiences…productive and challenging.
KW What year did you start doing that?
LW That would have been 1958. Same year I got married, same year I graduated from college.
KW But before you did that you were at Wayne State doing art, and what else were you studying?
LW I started in Fine Arts. After a period of time, I guess I was about twenty, I remember having a discussion with myself and questioning: Okay, guy what are you going to do when you graduate? Now that you know a little bit about this and a little bit about that, how are you gonna use it? I sat by myself, kind of like Little Jack Horner sitting in a corner. No parent around to tell me what to do about this. I didn’t talk to a counselor. I didn’t seek help about this. It was on me to figure it out.
I decided that whatever I did had to allow me to do what I wanted to do with my artwork. Whatever I did had to allow me to do something with people. I started going through a list of the art positions, things that I knew a little bit about. As I went down the list, what disappeared first were things like architecture, graphic design, and interior design—not because they were not viable and honorable positions, but because they involved having clients who would have specific needs or personal requirements. In such circumstances you owed it to the clients to produce something viable to meet their expectations. I decided that I wanted to do what I wanted to do without external expectations or pressures.
As I went further down the list, it got smaller and smaller. By the time I finished the list the only thing left on it was teaching. I thought about that for quite a while and concluded, Teaching, hmm. I can do what I want to do with my art and I could work with people. So I went to the Department Chair and I said, “I want to change my major from Fine Arts to Art Education.” He talked to me for quite a while, desperately trying to convince me not to do that. After realizing that I was really serious, he said, “Okay, if you must do this, I will go ahead and initiate the paperwork for you, but promise me one thing.” I said, “Sure. What’s that?” “Promise me you won’t let them fill you with too much methodology.” I said, “Not a problem at all. I can do what I want in the summers. I will have this kind of freedom and that.” He just smiled, because I think he realized that I clearly didn’t have any idea what methodology meant. (laughter)
Flight, Larry Walker, Acrylic, Plastic on watercolor paper, 28 x 36 inches, completed 2013.7
He filled out the paperwork and I shifted over into the Art Education Department and got a whole new introduction to art and to children and the kind of expectations one could have from their work and of things you could bring to them as an art person. I bought into that whole-heartedly. It went well. I graduated and wound up with a teaching position at Pattengill Elementary School in Detroit. A couple years later, when I went back to school for my master's degree at Wayne State University, I came to realize that the closer I got to completing the master's degree, the further removed I felt from the elementary kids. I figured I needed another level so I applied for high school and colleges. I shifted into a high school, and that was okay, but within a year, a college opportunity showed up at the University of the Pacific (UOP) in Stockton, California. My wife Gwen and I packed up Dana, Larry Jr., and all we could manage and drove across country to California in 1964—for what was initially set up to be a one-to-two year temporary replacement for a faculty member on sabbatical leave…. As it turned out, our lives were wonderfully changed and enriched. We were at the University for nineteen successful years and increased the family in 1969 when you (Kara) joined us.
KW I’m doing this thing where I’m imagining the transition, but then there’s a question I have. How did you start making art in the first place? That seems like such a rare thing. There’s high school and then—
LW I guess I do have to go back a little further because there were very significant things that took place, probably during my childhood, that set the stage for creativity or the need for visual expression. I am the youngest of eleven children, born in the rural area of Franklin, Georgia to CaSanna Wood Walker and Willie Bunyon Walker. I never really got to know my father because he passed away at age forty-nine in 1936, when I was only six months old. We lived on farmland. I don’t remember a whole lot about farmland other than my brothers participating in plowing the field and planting things and so forth. I was a little kid and I tagged along and got to sit on a horse or a mule every once in a while. Somewhere along the way our house burned down. At that time we were sharecropping. As an adult I found out much later, that before we were sharecropping and before the Depression, our father had owned about 100 acres of land. I understand that the Depression brought many difficulties for my now-widowed mother and her eleven children. She and my older brothers and sisters didn’t really have the expertise or experience to effectively use the land to generate funds over a long period of time. They sold off a little here and a little there, and before long the major parts of the land (i.e. valuable lumber and other key areas) were gone and the family was thrust into a sharecropping situation. The family began to disperse to other areas. Two sisters got married and moved away, as did my oldest brother who had completed his studies at Benedict College. Another brother moved to Atlanta to study at college and the other brother joined the armed services.
I remember the house burning down and having to move to LaGrange, Georgia to live with my oldest brother and his wife for a while, until my mother found a place. From LaGrange, the family continued to get a bit smaller as two sisters migrated to New York City in search of better job opportunities. They in turn sent back for my mother and three sisters and myself to come to New York City as well. In 1941, when I was six years old, we moved to New York City. That was a whole new life, another beginning . . . a new experience. Riding a train for the first time, being in contact with people of a different color and background who gave me strange looks caused me to feel out of place. I was very much aware of the fact that we carried our lunch and dinner with us in picnic baskets and I was annoyed that the smell of fried chicken filled the entire railroad car and called more attention to our presence. To this day I have never really enjoyed riding a train or the smell of cold fried chicken.
KW May I just interrupt, although I know I’m not supposed to, the dinner on the plane ride down here was cold, fried chicken. (laughter)
LW In New York, we got off the train and into the subway, which I didn’t know anything about. We rode someplace. I didn’t know where we were…I couldn’t see sky or ground—just concrete, metal and lots of people. Is this New York? It’s all underground. We got off the subway train at 145th Street and Lenox Avenue and walked up to the street. There I saw skyscrapers that seemed to reach up to the heavens. I had never seen anything that tall before. I said, “My goodness! We’re moving to a very, very ‘rich’ place.” Some time later, I discovered that that "rich" place was six-story tenement buildings in Harlem. Everybody who lived in that area of the city was pretty much in the same boat. The notion of being in a low-income area or being poor was not an issue. I was in a glorious place, a much different and better place than where I was before. There you had dirt and sand and dust all around. You had farm stuff and animals. Here, the animals were dogs and people walked them on leashes. You had tall buildings. I didn’t know what an elevator was. We didn’t have any. We climbed six stories up and six stories down, day after day after day. That was my life. Going to elementary school, just a few blocks away. I had a very nice teacher, I don’t remember her name, but somewhere along the way she discovered that I had some interest in drawing. So she would involve me in doing these murals in chalk on the blackboard—George Washington or some other historic figure or event that we were studying. That must have been third grade.
Kara Walker, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994, Cut paper on wall, 156 x 600 inches, 396.2 x 1524 cm. Installation view:Selections 1994, The Drawing Center, New York, 1994. Photo: Orcutt Photo
In hindsight, one of the things that always interested me was the difference between one environment and another. Between that uncomfortable and somewhat oppressive train environment and that initially free New York City environment. Between a farm environment and a New York City environment. Two different spaces, like two different worlds. That they could coexist was eye opening. One could go back and forth between them if necessary.
At that time—this was the 1940s—there was my mother, three sisters, and myself. When we got to New York, the five of us moved in with my oldest sister Betty, and her husband Charles. It was seven of us in this four-room apartment before Charles and Betty moved to Detroit, following the “opportunity for jobs.” My oldest brother, William, had moved to Detroit from Georgia. They were all focused on the auto industry.
One of things that was intriguing was that my brother-in-law—Charles Maxwell, Betty’s husband—was an artist. He used to be a Merchant Marine. He had had some training over in Europe and had learned to paint on glass. He did a painting on the glass doors between the bedroom and living room—what do you call those doors that open up like that?
KW French doors.
LW They were all glass panels on which he painted a landscape. He had to paint it backwards; working on one side of each panel he painted details in first and all the backdrop stuff came afterwards. When you looked from the side he was painting on, it looked like a total abstraction, but from the other side you could see the details and structure of mountains, trees, and fields. It was fascinating to watch this painting develop. He also had some art books that he would share; one was about Van Gogh. Looking at the Van Gogh book I became very much enamored with the idea that people could paint things that looked like things. At the same time, some of Van Gogh’s paintings emanated something that was greater than their appearance—an energy from inside, like they were throbbing. I found out later that the way he applied paint to the surface helped create that situation. Again, the notion of interior and exterior, an inner life pushing forward to affect the outer surface, was fascinating to me.
At the time, when we got to New York, there was probably a gang on every block, or close to every block. But there was not a gang at 145th Street, because like 125th and 135th, it was a commercial street with businesses on one or both sides; as such there were fewer apartments. The streets in between had apartments on both sides; thus, there were more kids and more opportunities for gangs to develop. There were girl gangs too. My sisters and I managed to avoid serious trouble because my mother stressed things like, “You come home after school. You stay inside until I get home. After I get home, you can go out and play a little bit, but I don’t want you getting into trouble.” When I got home I would do things like draw. When it was warm, I sat on the fire escape, six stories up, and drew whatever I saw across the street: the gas station, people walking on the street. On the backside of all the apartment buildings they had fire escapes and clotheslines that ran from one side to the other. I would draw those clotheslines, and those fire escapes, and draw those little bricks. Or I would do things to amuse myself. An old card table became a baseball field. I painted a baseball diamond on it and I would play baseball with my hand. I would swing at the ball with one hand, while the other threw a little wad of paper and then I would run the bases.
Good Deeds, Wall Spirits-(Im Wandel der Zeit), Larry Walker, Mixed Materials/Diptych, 60 x 101 inches, completed 2013.8
When kids reached junior high-school age they had to go to the junior high school in that area. They were divided so that the boys went to one junior high school and the girls went to another. A tough situation where you had potentially X number of gangs in one school. Horrendous possibilities were there ... . Great place to get bullied, especially if you weren’t in a gang.
I had a few friends but I was not in a gang. The thing that saved me in junior high school was Stanley, the leader of the gang on 143rd Street. Stanley was in my art class. (It was my first art class.)
KW I was going to say, people barely get those anymore.
LW Somewhere along the way, Stanley discovered that I could draw things that looked half real. He asked me to draw “dirty pictures” for him. I didn’t know much about what dirty pictures were except I had seen some of these little thin cartoon-type books that people sold. They had all kinds of characters in them, doing all kinds of things. I would improvise and emulate that stuff and draw the characters. I gave him the books and he was happy. He wouldn’t let anyone bother me for two years. If somebody came up to me looking menacing, Stanley would intervene: “Leave him alone! That’s my man!” And they would go away and leave me alone. Stanley was respected as a gang leader. He was tough, but he was also a sensitive guy, which I didn’t realize until later. Our art class had Ms. Evans as our art teacher. Ms. Evans was relatively small given the size of her students. But she ruled her class with an iron hand. Nobody would mess with her. She always had an interesting project to do. She got us involved in drawing and painting and discussing artists. Stanley did something one day and she said, “Okay Stanley. You know the rules. Come on up here,” which meant that Stanley had to come up to the front of the room and get slapped on his hand with a ruler. She had rules, certain infractions warranted one or two whacks with the ruler. Stanley went up to the front of the room to get his whacks. “Oh, Ms. Evans you don’t want to do that,” Stanley said. “Stanley, you know the rules. Put your hand out.” He stuck his hand out and somebody in the back of the room began to snicker and Stanley was on him real quick, “All right, sucker! Shut your mouth!” He put his hand out, got his whack and went back to his seat. At the end of the term, Stanley and his warlord (second in command in the gang) talked to everybody in class. He said, “Okay. We are collecting money to get Ms. Evans a gift.” Everybody scrounged up pennies, nickels, and dimes, whatever, and gave it to him. I don’t know how much he collected. No one knew if it was ever going to be seen again. The last day of class, Stanley comes up to the front of the room. He said, “Ms. Evans, the class got you a gift because we think you deserve this gift.” And he and his warlord presented her a print of a Degas painting that they had gone out and purchased with this money. At least we think they purchased it. That this tough dude had enough sensitivity and enough gumption to go around and collect money, and present this print on behalf of the class to Ms. Evans—I always thought about that. It always affected me. Here was someone who had all kinds of potential. Not potential as an artist, but potential as an organizer, as someone who could get things done.
I never knew what happened to him, because at the end of the eighth grade Ms. Evans had chosen four students from her class and sent us off to take the entrance exam at The High School of Music & Art, which was on 135th street next to City College at that time. We were all terrified. We knew we were going to get beat up going out of our area, out of our territory. That didn’t happen though. We all got accepted and I began high school as an art major.
That experience at The High School of Music & Art changed my life in many ways. It was the first time I went to school with people of different nationalities, races, different everything. I got introduced to new ways of doing things, new ways of looking at things, different languages being spoken. One kid came to school one day with his pet hamster. When I saw it on his shoulder I jumped and said, “Hey! There’s a rat on your shoulder!” He said, “That’s my pet hamster.” I had no idea. There was a kid from Lithuania. I had never heard of Lithuania. Didn’t know that it existed.
The High School of Music & Art was a unique place. As you probably know, it was a sister school to The High School of Performing Arts. There were a few students like Diahann Carroll who took classes at both schools. I guess it had been the goal of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to promote the arts in a magnet school context. In 1984, the schools merged into the LaGuardia High School of Music & Arts and Performing Arts, which incidentally is where your daughter goes to school.
KW I know! (laughter)
LW Our granddaughter goes to the same school that I went to. That’s cool. I remember some of my teachers who probably influenced me in one way or another. One was Ms. Lee Rosen. She was primarily a ceramics sculptor. I had her for a design class. The first day of class she told everybody what they needed for materials and what they needed to do in terms of conducting themselves. She said things like, “Do not expect to make something in this class that you are going to take home and share with your parents. Something that they would hang on a wall, put on a table. Probably you are not going to have anything to take home at all. The materials that you are going to need for this class are not expensive—a pair of scissors, a box of straight pins, a piece of cardboard approximately nine inches by twelve inches, and a pack of black construction paper.” Okay. So we come in with our black construction paper, our scissors, and our pins. She says, “Today I want you to get out your scissors and cut that construction paper into a series of strips of different sizes, different lengths, all in strips. No circles. No curves. Just strips. Your assignment is to create opposition, conflict. When you get that, pin the strips down with the pins and we’ll talk about that. So we moved our strips around, pinned them down, and put them on the wall to have a critique. When you look at these things on the wall you start to see that some of them really look like they are in conflict and some of them don’t. The next assignment was to create harmony with the same strips of paper. Day after day she would come up with some term to describe a situation. Our task was to design that situation or term with the shapes at hand.
Toward the end of the term she allowed us to use different shapes, to cut some squares, some triangles, and circles. She eventually allowed us to use a couple of different colors too. It was true; by the end of the term we didn’t have anything to show. Everything was in our heads. Being able to organize on a flat surface and to give the illusion of depth and movement reminded me of some of those Van Gogh paintings I had seen, where there seemed to be an internal energy. If you can actually generate energy out of something like a piece of paper or paint, that’s exciting. It’s like creating a whole new life. That’s some of the early stuff. I’ve been talking for a while.
KW Hey, when did you meet mom? Was she interested in art at all?
LW We—my wife Gwen and I—made a point of taking each of our kids (together or individually), you and Dana and Larry, to museums or art galleries and frequently some of you went with me to deliver work for an exhibit. I remember one occasion when we had taken you with us to see an exhibit at the Berkeley Museum in Berkeley, California.
KW Was it Claes Oldenburg?
LW Yes. (laughter) There was an Oldenburg sculpture, an inflated vacuum cleaner or something like that. Maybe it was an ice bag.
KW I think it was an ice bag.
LW Yeah. An ice bag. It would inflate and deflate. You were relatively small. You were fascinated watching it grow and then deflate, grow and deflate.
KW Like my ego!
Kara Walker, Detail of: Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994, Cut paper on wall, 156 x 600 inches, 396.2 x 1524 cm. Installation view: Kara Walker: Mon Ennemi, Mon Frère, Mon Bourreau, Mon Amour ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2007. Photo: Florian Kleinefenn
LW By the time you turned thirteen, we moved here to the Atlanta area. I had accepted the position as Chair of the Department of Art at Georgia State University. That was one of those major situations for you in terms of change in environment and change in everything. What were some of the things that happened to you during that time?
KW High school, which is always troubling. You’re trying to find your place in the world and find a community of like-minded people. Of course, the first high school was Towers and that was a little microcosm of the mythologies and racisms that I didn’t understand exactly, because I think I was naive and/or protected from them. I don’t know how much of that I need to say or you need to hear. At Towers I was called a “nigger,” told I looked like a monkey, accused (I didn’t know it was an accusation) of being a “Yankee,” sent home by the staff for breaking arbitrarily enforced rules—the whole list of rules related to a set of reduced expectations of me, as a person being reduced to a category. When I didn’t meet my own expectations in an AP English class, I literally demoted myself to a regular class that was so bad, so much the stereotype of disinterested and disruptive students taught by a frustrated and jaded teacher. I really stood out in those classes! I remember I wrote a poem about failure and that second English teacher told me I should be in AP classes, and I was like “No….” Anytime I had a black instructor at that school, they took a special interest in me and told me I had “talent.” With some of the white staff, one counselor in particular, it was more of a challenge to prove I was different. I felt myself trying to assert my “me-ness,” my humanness, in a place that didn’t really see me as part of the mass, and an undesirable mass at that. I took an art class, which I think was really beneficial and I met a couple of interesting people along the way (who have since disappeared from my life altogether). Actually, my art teacher from that era contacted me earlier this year, I am blanking on her name. She probably was encouraging. There was a girl in my art class named Diana. I was both afraid of and friends with Diana. She had moved from Ohio with her dad, who was a jazz musician. She was nothing but trouble. She was biracial, had punked-out hair that was shaved on the sides, curly on the top, and long braids in the back. She was like the legitimate punk girl. What I always kind of wanted to be. She called me a poseur, but hey, in that environment that was punk enough. She drew really well. She had a natural eye and was very methodical in her drawings, but also rigid in the things she wanted to draw. We were the weird girls who drew in art class in an underprivileged school full of self-proclaimed white “rednecks,” and black athletes, and would-be “preppies.” We became friends and she made that first high school situation a little bit more bearable. I kept running into people who I thought were friends and then they would avow, declare, their redneck status by saying something completely over-the-top racist. Literally I would be standing with one group of friends and then someone would start talking about “niggers.” I would just walk into a blank space in between people so there was nobody that I was talking to. The German class, the German club, was the other weird outgrowth of me finding friendship and weirdness. The oddballs were in art class and German class. Then we moved again, to Stone Mountain, Georgia. I wasn’t familiar with Stone Mountain as a place, as an entity, as an object with a history until a little bit later. While still at Towers some self-proclaimed redneck classmates of mine would talk about going to Stone Mountain to see the laser show. I didn’t realize that the mountain has a carving commemorating the Confederacy and that the KKK still had a strong presence there, or that the laser show was all “Dixie” and a celebration of that southern Civil War/plantation myth. When we moved to the area I recall the Klan march announcement and the American flags we got on our mailbox pretty early on. Racial division in the school was very apparent. I was always a person who was trying to negotiate a very hard racial line. Kind of failing at it—or flailing at it—but rather optimistically. (laughter)
LW That sounds like an earlier aspiration when you had interest in becoming a cartoonist and created your own cartoon with your own characters. They were always very friendly and doing interesting things together.
KW It’s good to get goofball slapstick. You know, the Laurel and Hardy of my imagination. The cartoons kind of grew out of TA for Tots in first grade—a kind of transactional analysis, self-reflection, and feelings. It was a 70s-California-West Coast-New Age thing. I have one book that I made when I was seven, when my sister Dana went off to USC. It’s all reflections on family, from a child’s-eye view. As I grew up it got harder to feel or be objective. I think I always took art seriously as a pursuit, even as I was floundering around in high school. My eleventh and twelvth-grade art teacher, Julie Schaffer, nominated me for the Governor’s Honor Program. That was my game-changer. You took me to the portfolio review. There was one round were I dropped off my work and a second round where I had to go and perform and make art on the spot. When I got into the program, I spent six weeks in Valdosta, Georgia in the sweltering, buggy, humid summer, making friends and feeling the urgency and agency for making stuff. It felt good again.
Other Voices, Other Spaces – Urban Spirits, Larry Walker, Acrylic, mixed materials on canvas, 48 x 89 inches, completed 2007
LW I was amazed at the quality of your work when you came back. It had more discipline, there was more emphasis on composition and clarity, color, and so forth. It wasn’t cartoonish. It wasn’t mythological. It was just straight-up stuff, where it seemed like, Hey, she’s learning something about the foundations of art.
KW The art-making tools. Yeah. Paint—this is how you mix it.
LW Harry Ally, a painter, was the teacher in charge of that group.
KW Yeah, there was a woman there too; I forgot her name. Harry Ally was on task with us. I also took a good drama class while I was down there. It was my other quasi-interest.
Georgia got weirder for me as I continued on. I stayed through the Atlanta College of Art, got mixed up with a few bad men, and regained the sense of the limitations that might be imposed on me as a black woman. Period. Let alone as an artist. “Artist” was already such an outside pursuit from far left field.
LW The work you were doing as an undergraduate at the Atlanta College of Art was on a very different track than the work that you were doing when you got into the RISD grad program in Rhode Island.
KW Oh yeah. Of course I didn’t have a clue what art I wanted to be making when I got into undergrad. The making of things had always been available to me. I just continued on without thinking of the who, what, and where. Why do artists do the work they do? Why do artists make the choices that they make? It was a learning process. I think the gap year between undergrad and graduate school gave me the opportunity to ask the question: Why am I making this work? The about, and for, and why. What meaning does it have? But it dovetailed with questions of race and gender and agency. People I was meeting and the limited expectations I was butting up against. I mean I spent that part of my late adolescence, from nineteen to twenty-two, falling for and having a tumultuous affair with an older guy—a local artist who lived out in the country. I fell in with a few other folks, too. Sex was my main pursuit and white men were my objective, I somehow sought out their legitimizing potential or sought to make an impact on them. Eventually I broke up with my poor neurologically unstable boyfriend (he had a cerebral hemorrhage at a young age and was quite fragile). I had no idea what my life was about, and although I had a clue about what I wanted from it, I wasn’t sure how to go about it and if I should continue with it—life, I mean. That year after ACA—working at Oxford Bookstore and living at home, painting in the space above the garage—was one of the worst for me, emotionally. I had what a therapist later suggested was a “schizoid reaction.” I was physically present, but so not there that I once thought I saw another person in my place. It’s hard to explain if it was a hallucination, my out-of-body experience. She was the “negress” basically, the “me” that I saw. I took that moment as a sign, however, and I applied that sign to my art, and decided to try to not go insane and to see what my next chapter was. It was a particularly scary time. Looking back I see what a fragile person I was.
Kara Walker, ... (And Modern Black Identity), 2010, Unique ink transfer on paper 94 x 72 inches, 238.8 x 182.9 cm
When I got to RISD, I made a plan for myself, which is something that I hadn’t done before. I was also on my own for the first time—a little bit late—I was twenty-two. I wanted to work harder, be more directed, more focused. I felt like I knew what I wanted to tackle in my work. I knew what I had been avoiding in my work in Atlanta. And I knew why. I needed some distance in order to tackle some darker aspects of my personality and experience. RISD and the environment around Providence and all of its colonial nostalgia, and the collegiate air of being down the street from Brown University, gave me a sense of purpose in a way that was a little bit larger.
You know, when I was still at ACA, I went with a few friends to DC. Stayed with your sister, Auntie Katie, looked at a few shows. There was a Mike Kelley show up and a couple of other important exhibitions, like Sigmar Polke. But the thing that actually knocked me out was all of the historical art—the National Gallery, the Smithsonian and all of these genre paintings and big history paintings. I really felt like a deeply perverse connection with them. I felt like, This isn’t the work I’m supposed to like! I’m supposed to like modern, gestural pieces that reveal something about the interior of the maker—and these don’t do that at all and if they do, they do it in ways that are so subtle and disguised in other sorts of materials and techniques.
That was also a question of mine: What images do I actually like looking at versus making? I spent a lot of time in libraries at RISD and Brown. Part of the plan that I made for myself was—I wish I could articulate my twenty-two, twenty-three-year-old self—to try to look at everything as though it were black. Everything is a black woman. That was the proposition. It was an acceptance of self and an acceptance of these weird limitations that are imposed on this self, my subjectivity—and then to try and look at historical images: at incidents of colonialism, at the formation of the idea of America, of slavery. Different sorts of representations of blackness within all of that—it sort of freed me up to approach everything this way, even though it imposed these very extreme limitations on a point of view. It was that paradox that I really wanted to try and articulate. Not just the history, the images, but also the paradoxical, contradictory mechanics.
I had a student the other day at Columbia say these words to me when she “got it.” She was making sculpture and she said, “Well, you know, I just decided I’m going to take the fact of myself as given. I accept myself.” And it freed her up to do whatever work she wanted to do, instead of having to explain her blackness or woman-ness as her originating force.
The other part of my project at RISD that still carries on and which I still battle with today is that I felt the need to abandon painting really dramatically. I needed to set the kind of painting that I was trying to do aside altogether. Painting, for me, is so fraught as a technical set of problems of color and wetness, fluidity, and all of those things that come up with painting and depth of field. I felt like painting was bound up with an idea of patriarchy that did not necessarily have me in its best interests as a viewer, appreciator, colleague—colleague mostly. I didn’t feel like I was a peer to the kind of painting that I actually enjoyed and admired. At the High Museum while I was still here in Atlanta, I saw a show of German Expressionist paintings. That one kind of blew me away. I felt like each one of those artists had a mission. They were really trying to articulate an internal life that was in conflict with political realities. I thought that was also important for me to consider. How was my understanding, or love of painting at odds with where painting would place me? Painting would place me at its margins somehow. I also started looking at historical paintings that were placing black people at the margins. Grad school was important in a lot of respects. Just unmaking things that I had taken for granted, dismantling and piecing them back together with elements that were important.
LW Around the time you finished your degree at RISD in 1994, I remember you wrote a letter to us expressing concern and the possibility of a backup plan to being an artist. The backup plan at the time was to do fashion design or modeling.
KW It wasn’t exotic dancing? I didn’t put that one down? (laughter)
LW You had been talking to somebody who had given you some notion that all you would need to do to become a top model and do fashion stuff would be to take one or two classes and have some introductory modeling experiences. You were asking for an opinion.
KW Really?
LW Your mom stepped right in and responded, “I thought you wanted to be an artist? If that’s what you want to do, then that’s what you should do. And don’t let these other things get in the way.” You don’t remember that?
KW No. I did a couple of fashion things at RISD. I don’t know if I seriously thought I would be a model.
LW As a backup.
KW As a backup, maybe. At the end of every semester, all of the fashion students would run to every tall woman in the program and beg them to model their clothes.
Larry Walker, Quiet Control, Acrylic, Mixed Material, Collage, 32 x 39 inches, completed 2009.5
LW When you were at the Atlanta College of Art you had the notion that you would wind up working in a—
KW—In a brothel?
LW No, in a restaurant.
KW Oh yeah. Well, I did that just to get through school: coffee shop, bookstore. I never took having a job all that seriously. When I actually started looking for work, while I was still at RISD, I went to the CAA (College Art Association) conference in New York to look for a teaching job and had one interview with a pretty shady school in Connecticut. I was told that the Reverend Moon Organization had bought this college, and I thought, Really? Is this the best I can do?
LW What was this interview for?
KW It was for a teaching job. The guy who was head of the program was probably two years older than me; I was twenty-four at the time. I was staying with a friend, Margaret Curtis, who had gone to ACA and who had scandalously moved to New York with one of our professors and had a bit of a career for herself as a painter. She and I went over to the Drawing Center—one of the few places that would actively review slides and occasionally select a work for a group show. I dropped my slides off (since I had them from my job interview) and felt like, Okay, that was something.
A few months later I got a call from Ann Philbin at The Drawing Center asking if I could do my work in a larger scale. Like fifty feet. I said, “Sure.” At RISD I had a studio space that was smaller than this room, with one viable wall to work on and a window on the other. That was the big studio. My first year at RISD I had the small studio. It was like an office cubicle, and I spent a lot of time working and crying in it. It was all good, cathartic tears—over ideas, not being able to articulate them and not getting the full experience. The fifty-foot wall at the Drawing Center was kind of funny. I think Ann Philbin still credits herself for my big work.
I was still living in Providence at the time and I asked around if anyone knew of a good adhesive that I could use for large sheets of paper. Now it’s almost twenty years later and I’m at this point of obsolescence with the materials that I have been using. The solution that I came up with back then was a roll-on hot waxer used for paste-up. It was a great solution but was supposed to be a temporary one. I thought, Later, when I have some time, I will come up with a better way to do this. I didn’t find the time. (laughter)
LW You can take the paper off the wall?
KW Yeah, you can take it off and reapply it, up to a point. I mean the paper is still fragile, depending on its weight. And sometimes it has to be pinned up a little bit. But it creates an illusion of flatness—the paper just kind of disappears into the wall. It’s not all bumpy and pinny. Not too long or voluminous. The Drawing Center work had some very large elements to it. The work had two floor-to-ceiling trees and a long piece of paper that represented an island, and in between and all along it it had almost life-size figures cut from this black photo-backdrop paper. The title was "Gone; an Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred B’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart." I wanted it to be a kind of opening phrase to a tableaux—like something from Gone with the Wind or a romance novel, but with a wicked twist. I wanted there to be an awareness that this work was the product of a specific black woman, and I wanted it to contain all my contradictory lusts and self-abnegating tendencies. I think this work was fueled by this frustration I felt—that the story of black art and being black always returns to a compromising set of locations and representations; it is always about “us” and rarely about “ME.” But instead of feeling angry about it, it kind of cracked me up.
LW You had a couple situations where I believe you were asked to change the material in order to paint directly on the wall?
KW I’ve done it two or three times, I think.
LW How did that work out?
KW It works. Let’s say there’s a piece at The New School that is like a permanent mural. I don’t know if I will ever feel satisfied with that versus the paper because it is so important to me that these pieces be semi-dimensional. They are two-dimensional but there is still a moderate sculptural quality there. They are cutouts and not paintings. The first time I did this mural approach was for the collector Peter Norton. Initially, he purchased a work and had done a lot of the research for me and had found an adhesive that seemed to be workable for a long-term display. I had an exhibition copy cut that they could put on the wall and use this with a more permanent-spray adhesive. I don’t remember, I think it was for a section of the piece African’t from 1995. But the work still buckled and did all the things that paper does—the fibers stretched and shrunk, even in his climate-controlled condominium. The solution was to work with this sign-painter guy and make this big stencil on the wall over the exhibition copy, remove the cutouts, and paint with a couple layers of black flasche—starting with a color that matches the wall for the bleed and then using a black flasche, which has that same matte richness as the paper. It sort of disappears into the wall. Again, it’s still a painting.
LW So what do you see for yourself down the road in terms of materials?
KW (laughter) Interestingly enough, I’m stockpiling a lot of the materials right now, getting the waxers on eBay. For instance, the Guggenheim has a piece of mine Insurrection… and the problem is that it has the overhead projectors, which are becoming obsolete. Everything that I have been using, overhead projectors, adhesive wax, eight-inch by ten-inch transparencies, super 8 film, including silhouettes, are obsolete. It was intense to think about what should happen in the future with these works. Of course, the Guggenheim has an exhibition copy of the cut-out elements and they have the waxers and the rollers for installing the work. Every piece of mine comes with this set of instructions and materials that we soon won’t be able to get. I don’t know. It’s a question. Some of my studio assistants will have to just do that—research and test different materials as technology advances. Well, I will find another way of working.
LW There was a period of time, right after you won the MacArthur Award, when all sorts of strange situations seemed to develop among the artists in the area who seemed to be concerned about the nature of what you were doing. It seemed to be compounded or confused by the fact that you had won a MacArthur award.
KW Specifically, there was the Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell letter.
LW Yeah, that whole campaign to prevent your work from being shown in various museums—
KW One argument was that the work shouldn’t be supported because it was perpetuating racist stereotypes. Another argument was that I was too young and getting too popular or too hot and that this was just a symptom of the racism of these institutions—I was only twenty-seven and hadn’t paid my dues. I had so many shows at the beginning of that year, 1997, before the MacArthur even came down the road. There was the show at the Renaissance Society, and a group show at the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Biennial. I was working on the book for the Renaissance Society show and I was pregnant. I was giving a talk at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and had a show there. Then I gave birth. That whole period of time was pretty rough. Then the MacArthur happened, praise of the highest sort, but then came the letter-writing campaign. I think it was Peter Norton who first alerted me that there was a letter going around, I believe he even faxed me a copy because—I am not sure I even had email then. The letter was from Howardena Pindell and Betye Saar and “concerned” artists. And it basically called me out by name as an artist who was making work that reasonable people would find racist, sexist, and offensive. She called on institutions to withdraw their support and censor it. It worked in a few instances—at DIA in Detroit, I think a print of mine was pulled out of a show. But in many respects the letter tended to work in my favor, although I spent the next several years answering to the “controversy” my work elicited. I believe Ms. Saar got sick of being asked continually about my work and whether there was a generational divide in the purposes and perceptions of Black Art. Sometimes I want to do a biography of illness when it comes to the stresses of my—
LW Interestingly enough, I remember, when you were in high school, we had an exhibition of Betye Saar’s work at Georgia State University. You came to see that exhibit and you met Betye Saar. I remember her giving you all sorts of encouraging comments about continuing to work and continuing to do your best. I wondered if she ever made the connection between having met you when you were younger and what she was saying later on.
KW I don’t know. I don’t feel the need to ask ever. Wasn’t Howardena Pindell also exhibited there?
LW Yes. She also exhibited at the university. We can leave that part alone.
Kara Walker, Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!, 2012-13, Graphite crayon, pastel, and Flasche on paper; acrylic, watercolor, gouache and graphite on paper; cut paper and paint on wall, Installation dimensions variable. Installation view: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2013. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago
KW I just remember that you always said it was difficult interacting with Howardena Pindell. But you are a very generous person when it comes to people’s humanity and spirits, so if you say somebody is difficult they must legitimately be difficult.
LW On the other hand, we also had an exhibit of Robert Colescott’s work at the university. After the MacArthur controversy Robert told me, “Just tell your daughter to keep doing what she’s doing.” Raymond Saunders called me during that time, too. He said, “What is all that stuff I hear about your daughter? People are calling me, wanting me to join them in saying this and saying that. I’m not doing any of that! I think she should just do what she’s doing.”
KW I guess it was a real pull, either or. I’ve encountered people since then who, for better or for worse (well for worse actually)—said, “When that letter came out I didn’t side with them.” A buddy-buddy kind of situation.
LW “But I didn’t say anything else either. I just kept my mouth shut.” (laughter)
KW As an outgrowth of that, Howardena Pindell produced a book in 2008, that seemed long overdue or just a bit late out the gate. It was around the same set of issues but really tied directly to me and my work rather than other artists who might be dealing with similar subject matter. “Kara Walker: yes. Kara Walker: no. Kara Walker: question mark.” I didn’t read all of it. She solicited essays and words from different people—a lot of artists, some writers, art critics. Some of what I read was pretty mean-spirited. Some of it was kind of hedging. The hedging I find novel and interesting because hedging says, “Well I don’t begrudge her success, but I guess I could see how. . .”
The success versus responsibility thing. Seems like eleven or twelve years after the initial letter, the fact that I am considered successful, seem to be making my way in the global art market and all that, has kind of trumped the struggle, for now… People want to know what my “secret” is.
LW My recollection is that one of the people who contributed to that book met you years after in Barbados. He said to me, “She’s a very pleasant person. I was surprised.” I said, “Yes. And…?” He said he was doing research on approaches that a certain number of women had taken in their work—and that he had come to realize that the nature of what they were doing was similar to what you were doing in a different context, which in a sense made it legitimate: “Now I understand it better.” He sent me a copy of the paper he was writing. I said, “What do you want from me? If you now have changed your opinion of what my daughter is doing, you should share it with her and you should share it in the context of the paper.” I don’t think it ever got published.
KW There were a lot of dissertations floating around at some point. A former colleague pointed out to me, somewhat snarkily, that everywhere she goes she runs into somebody who is writing a dissertation on my work. It’s a point of amusement and terror. You don’t want to have everything that you do locked into a set of useful perimeters