The Collection

Kara Walker is one of the most acclaimed contemporary American artists, celebrated for her searing explorations of race, gender, sexuality, power, and violence. She is best known for her room-sized tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes, a medium she has transformed into a powerful vehicle for confronting the legacies of slavery and racism in the United States. Starkly graphic and hauntingly beautiful, Walker’s works stage provocative narratives that explore the entanglement of brutality, desire, history, and myth.

Walker earned her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art (1991) and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1994). At age 28, she was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1997), becoming one of its youngest recipients. She has since received numerous honors, including the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship (2008), election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2012), the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University (2017), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Graphic Art (2022). Since 2015, she has served as the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at Rutgers University.

Her work is represented in major museum collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Tate Modern (London), Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (Rome), and Deutsche Bank (Frankfurt).

Walker’s practice has also expanded into monumental public projects and performance. In 2014, she created A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby—a massive sugar-coated sphinx installed in Brooklyn’s defunct Domino Sugar Factory—commissioned by Creative Time. In 2015, as part of the Venice Biennale, she directed and designed Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma at Teatro La Fenice. Her major survey exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (2007) traveled internationally, and her recent solo shows have been presented at the Art Institute of Chicago, Camden Arts Centre (London), and Metropolitan Arts Centre (Belfast).