Kara Walker 

Kara walker was born on the 26^th of November, 1969 in California. She had spent her childhood in San Francisco but in the year 1983 her family moved to Atlanta where she receiver her BFA from the Atlanta college of the art in the year 1991. BFA stands fro Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. The artist Kara Walker is best known for exploring the race, gender and sexuality through her bold silhouette figures which are either painted or made from cut out stencils which have then been put up in walls of the exhibitions that she has done. In Kara Walkers work she shows the relationship between the blacks and the whites at her time and the history of the slavery that happened in the past.

During the high school years for kara walker she had white friends that did not consider her to be socially black. Kara Walker got her inspiration and started doing her passion for black and white silhouettes from her father.

“One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad’s lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: ‘I want to do that, too,’ and I pretty much decided then and there at age 2½ or 3 that I was an artist just like Dad.” —Kara Walker ¹

Kara Walkers themes are mainly about power, repressions, history race and sexuality. Her work was influenced by reading historical harlequin romances. After she had graduated in 1994, Walker had a show at The Drawing Art Center in New York City, which attracted many critics. Three years later Walker was then received with the MacArthur foundation award, which made her the youngest recipient. Also she became so well known that the Time magazine included her in the annual ‘100 Top Influential People in the world’. In the year 2002, Walker moved to Manhattan where she currently teaches at the school of arts at Columbia university.

n my opinion Kara Walkers work interest me because not only is her work just a painting or cut out stencils of black and white, it also tells you about the past  history about the blacks and whites and the slavery which happened, giving us a story to read when looking at her work. Also, the fact that she only uses black and white to create her beautiful and powerful pieces of art. By just using black and white , i find it personally hard to show the features of a person especially if you are trying to capture the emotions of a persons feelings. However, kara Walker has done an amazing job in showing a fantastic silhouette of the different characters and showing what is happening in the image.