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To say Kara Walker is an arresting visual artist of our time is an understatement. Named one of TIME’s most influential people in 2007, she’s the youngest artist to receive the MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant—an accolade among a laundry list of others for her pieces exploring themes of race, gender, and sexuality. At Penn, Walker curated the current “Ruffneck Constructivists” show at our Institute of Contemporary Art, which is on display until August 17. She was invited to our campus back on February 21 to talk with our own imminent prof. and poet, Charles Bernstein via a public event with the Penn Humanities Forum, but she cancelled due to an unexpected illness. However, this summer, there’s been a second chance for Penn people to follow the magnetic pulls of Walker, which beckon for some train-hoppin’ off-campus: among the lairs of bearded bohemians and hipster-tryhards in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint, stands a thirty-foot sculpture of a female sphinx— it’s Walker’s latest creation that no doubt commands attention with her majesty.
Entitled “The Subtlety,” Walker’s sphinx has been drawing national media coverage and crowds of both typical art-goers and other less typical visitors, including celebrities Alicia Keys and MIA. Commissioned by Creative Time, a New York public art group, Walker designed the 35-foot high and 75-foot long female sphinx and constructed it (with the help of an expert team) out of foam cubes that then were coated in pounds of white sugar. It fills a significant amount of space in the otherwise abandoned Domino Sugar Factory set to be demolished before the end of this year—and the factory’s walls are crusted over with rusted sugar (a perfect backdrop for selfies), filling the space with a stench of sweetness-gone-rotten through industrial decay.
Walker’s curation of the show at the ICA on our campus showed (via 11 unique artworks) that she has no fear in exploring richly complicated topics—like changes in urban architecture and the city-dwellers responsible for it, the overarching theme of the ICA show. Unsurprisingly, her embrace of the complex shows in her own artwork, too: her sugar-mama Sphinx raises questions about the history of slavery in America (slaves were responsible for the harvested sugar processed to whiteness in industrial factories) and its effects on African-American identity, explored visually through the greatly exaggerated and stereotyped features of the curvaceous body and Aunt-Jemina-like sphinx face. Other smaller brown-molasses sculptures (known as “subtleties” in elite English and French circles back in the Middle Ages) depicted cartooned slave boys whimsically holding baskets of sugar. They were falling apart in blood-like pools of melted molasses while beams of sunlight shined on them through the dusty factory glass windows. They were like slain martyrs in the chapel of a cathedral, as visitors flocked to the central, white mother sphinx figure.
Many metaphorical interpretations abound from the provoking (and smelly) artworks, and the show encouraged all visitors to literally explore different perspectives by snapping pics of the pieces with their iPhones and sharing them on social media with #karawalkerdomino. Over 12,000 photos have been shared on Instagram, over 1,000 on Twitter, and over 40 on Facebook, and not a single physical person (old and young) was seen without an iPhone in hand. It’s all very complicated, and everyone can bring a different set of eyes to the topic at hand, but Walker doesn’t leave us bored for a second.
On Campus:
Ruffneck Constructivists
Curated by Kara Walker
February 12 – August 17, 2014
118 South 36th Street
Institute of Contemporary Art
University of Pennsylvania
Three Train Hops Away:
A Subtlety by Kara Walker
Presented by Creative Time
May 10 – July 6, 2014
South 1st Street at Kent Avenue
Domino Sugar Factory
Williamsburg, Brooklyn