Kara Walker “Sweet Talks” Harvard

At the Radcliffe Institute, the artist unraveled some of the mysteries of her installation, A Subtlety.

Kara Walker's most recent work of public art, known as <i>A Subtlety,</i> made news months after its closing, when she produced a video, <i>An Audience,</i> compiling visitor reactions to the work in its final hours.
Walker gave her lecture, “Sweet Talk,” to a full house at the Knafel Center on December 8.

In 1994—the year she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design—Kara Walker made her debut as an artist at the Drawing Center in Soho. Three years later, at the age of 27, she became one of the youngest recipients of a MacArthur Genius grant. Since then, she has exhibited her work at the Whitney Biennial, the São Paulo Bienniel, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, much of it exploring American imaginings about the antebellum South, yoking genteel imagery to depictions of sex, exploitation, and violence.

With that brief sketch of Walker’s career, Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute, introduced the artist for her December 8 lecture, “Sweet Talk.” Taking the podium, Walker said that her first instinct after hearing these accolades was always to add: "My work is really funny. I should throw that in there."

What Walker called her “vaudevillian” streak, along with her interest in what’s “goofball,” can often be overlooked by viewers grappling with the serious themes invoked by her images. Perhaps they’re too startled to laugh—even as the long-winded, grandiose titles she usually favors seem to prompt laughter. (One example: 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.) Some are offended: early in her career a number of older black artists, including Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell, began a letter-writing campaign that called on institutions to stop exhibiting Walker’s work. But the most famous characterization of her artistic sensibility may come from an unlikely quarter: her then four-year-old daughter Octavia once declared, “Mommy makes mean art.”

Until recently, Walker has been best known for her work in two dimensions: life-sized paper silhouettes arranged in fantastic and violent tableaux. The figures, appearing pretty and delicate from afar, are jarring upon further study: a Southern belle sprouts an extra set of legs beneath her skirt; a boy, head diligently bent as he strums a musical instrument, has a wind-up gear jammed into his back and blood dripping from his mouth.

Then, last spring, Walker created her first large-scale work of public art in the empty Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn. For its centerpiece, she sculpted 80 tons of white sugar into a 40-foot-tall sphinx with exaggerated African features; the nude figure is attended by a trio of five-foot statues of basket-carrying boys, made of resin and a dark brown candy. She called the installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. Her Radcliffe Institute lecture walked the audience through the process of conceiving, mounting, and ultimately dismantling the work—as well as her thoughts on its fraught reception.

When the public-art organization Creative Time approached her about working at the factory, she said, “The big draw was the molasses.” The plant had been encrusted with the stuff for more than a hundred years, and she was fascinated by the stickiness of the material. With "chutzpah, bravado, and ego propelling me forward," the artist began to delve into sugar’s troubled history. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industry that fed Western tastes was founded on the Caribbean slave trade. The refining process could be understood as “dismantling darkness to create whiteness.” Though Walker’s previous projects had begun with writing or sketching, this one began with a PowerPoint file of compiled images. She showed the audience a sample: scenes of industrial accidents; the racist imagery in molasses advertisements. At the time, her mind kept returning to the idea of “ruins.” Then, she said, “Sidney Mintz saved my life.”

The anthropologist’s book, Sweetness and Power, detailed the spread of sucrose in the Western industrial world, exposing her to humanity’s “1,000 or 2,000 years of craving, of touch on the tongue.” As she read Mintz’s description of medieval sugar sculptures, called subtleties, an idea began to take shape. Walker’s mind went to Egyptian sphinxes—ruins that were revered, iconic, and also, she thought, “sort of silly.” When one day she was “nearly hit by a bus on Eighth Avenue with the word ‘sphinx’ on it,” she took it as a sign.

Walker then recounted the arduous physical process of populating the factory with the smaller “sugar boys.” Her team tested many recipes of corn syrup and sugar, to no avail—the sculptures kept sagging grotesquely the instant they emerged from their molds—before opting to use resin. Originally she had envisioned making 15; by the opening night, she had settled for five. The gala, however, caused two more casualties. She collected the shards of the smashed statues and placed them in the survivors’ baskets: “It felt right.” 

Perhaps this incident presaged the collisions to come. From May through July, visitors flocked to the installation, brandishing phones and tablets. Walker summarized the controversy succinctly: some were moved to tears by the artwork; others posed obscenely with the sphinx’s cleavage or exposed vulva for selfies; the first group grew angry with the second. A heated debate ensued, about racial politics, spectatorship, and the art world at large.

In November, well after the installation had closed, it emerged that Walker had filmed some of her visitors’ reactions. The resulting 28-minute video, An Audience, joined a larger exhibit of photographs and sketches related to A Subtlety. In their story breaking the news, which included a clip from Walker's video, Vulture (New York Magazine’s entertainment site) described it as “spying.” Walker cast her decision rather differently.

“I was realizing that I would never have this piece again,” she said. For the final hours of the installation, Walker brought video crews to the factory and instructed them to focus on black families’ encounters with the art: “It’s kind of simple, but it’s something you never see.” Then, in the last five minutes, she invited viewers to touch the sculptures. Some of the sugar on the sphinx was sloughed off. A child’s hand came away from a resin statue, sticky with amber honey.

Throughout her talk, Walker had largely withheld any judgment on the visitors to, or arguments about, her art. But as she played a short version of the video for the audience, she said, “The sphinx has a generosity about her even if the artist maybe doesn’t.”

In the question-and-answer session that followed, Walker spoke at more length about her biography and her previous work. A final question, posed by a Tufts graduate student, closed the evening. Earlier, Walker had cited her father, Larry Walker, an artist who taught at Georgia State University, as a formative influence. Because of him, she had been certain from an early age that she wanted to be an artist; she had also internalized his belief that “There was something in the language of painting that was universal"—as an undergraduate, she had shied away from exploring race and gender. The student asked Walker to talk about the moment she decided to “stop trying to be universal.” Then he rephrased: “When did you stop trying to be nice?”

Walker burst into laughter. “I never stopped trying to be nice—I just realized I wasn’t,” she said. “Those silhouettes, that sphinx, felt like the nicest things I could do.” For her, making this art was like “digging a grave I wanted to throw everybody into,” the artist explained, “Or the opposite—like building a structure.”

Read more articles by: Sophia Nguyen

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