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KARA WALKER: The Psychlorama, you know,

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was a major phenomenon in the 19th century,

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but it's just before cinema, you know.

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It's round.

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So you enter into this rotunda that's lit.

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It's like the peak of the painter's 
creative enterprise, you know,

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to make the painting surround the viewer

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and to create the illusion of depth and of space

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and to lure the viewer into the 
feeling of being a part of the scene.

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[Brazilian teacher]: Is there 
only one story being told here?

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It seems each figure comprises a story.

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At the same time, we’re in a round room?

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Does the story have a beginning or end?

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Most of my work is, the illusion 
is that it’s about past events.

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The illusion is that it’s simply about a 
particular point in history and nothing else.

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And it’s really part of the 
ruse that I tend to like to

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approach the complexities of my 
own life by distancing myself

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and finding a parallel in something prettier

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and more uh, genteel,

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like that picture of the Old 
South that’s a stereotype.

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I had started to read the book Gone With the Wind

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and was thrilled, with how, you know,

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engrossing that story was,

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and how grotesque it was at the same time…

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the romance of it, the storytelling,

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it was so rich and epic and 
that was what I hadn't expected.

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I hadn't expected to be titillated 
in the way that, you know,

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stories like that are meant to titillate.

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It was so much fodder for 
the work that I wanted to do.

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The distressing part was always being caught up

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in the voice of the heroine, Scarlet O'Hara.

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Scarlet, in her desperation is, you know,

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digging up dried-up roots and 
tubers down by the slaves’ quarters

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and she's overcome by a "niggery" scent?

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and vomits?

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And it's scenes like that, that you know,

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might go washed over by the sort of 
vast, epic structure of the story,

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but that is an epic moment.

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A lot of my work has been about the unexpected…

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that kind of wanting to be the heroine

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and yet wanting to kill the 
heroine at the same time.

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And, that kind of dilemma, that push and pull,

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is the underlying turbulence that I 
bring to each of the pieces that I make.

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The silhouette lends itself to, you know,

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avoidance of the subject, you know, 
not being able to look at it directly.

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My earliest memory of uh, wanting to be an artist–

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uh, I was three, I was sitting on my dad’s lap

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and he was drawing in his studio

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which was the garage of our 
house in Stockton, California.

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And I remember thinking to myself that I,

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I wanted to do what he did.

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And he used to give me chalk 
to draw on the sidewalk,

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and you know he would you 
know document my creations.

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When we moved from California to Georgia,

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I know that I was having nightmares 
about moving to the South.

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You know, the South already 
was a place loaded with,

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like I said, mythology, but also a 
reality of, you know, viciousness.

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It was just such a frightening prospect,


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to be sort of borderline 
between child and teenager

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and going into an environment where 
black kids are being targeted.

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Stone Mountain, Georgia is where 
I did most of my growing up.

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It’s like a Mount Rushmore type of 
thing, of the confederate heroes.

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That is pretty significant.

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Stone Mountain was a haven for the Ku Klux Klan.

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So that place had a little bit more resonance.

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It was just so in your face.

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There was no real hiding the fact.

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You know, what black stands for in white America,

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what white stands for in white 
America are all loaded with

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our deepest psychological 
perversions and fears and longings.

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Most of the pieces, I guess, have 
to do with exchanges of power,

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attempts to steal power away from others.

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I was tracing outlines of…

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of profiles you know thinking about uh, uh,

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uh, physiognomy and racist sciences and minstrelsy

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and the shadow and, and the dark side of the soul.

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And and I thought well you 
know I’ve got black paper here

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and I was making silhouette paintings 
but they weren’t the same thing.

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And, and it seemed like the most obvious answer,

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it took me forever to come to, just,

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just to make a cut in the 
surface of this black thing.

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You know I had this black paper 
and if I just made a cut in it,

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I was creating a hole, you know and it was 
like the whole world was in there for me.

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I've always been interested in the melodramatic,

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in outrageous gestures. I love history paintings…

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this artistic, painterly conceit,

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which is to make a painting a stage,

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and to think of your characters, 
your portraits or whomever,

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as characters on that stage…

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and to freeze-frame a moment 
that is full of pain and blood


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and guts and drama and glory.

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This work is two parts research 
and one part paranoid hysteria.

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It’s called “INSURRECTION.

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Our tools were rudimentary, yet we pressed on”…

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an image of a slave revolt 
in the antebellum south uh,

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where the house slaves got after their master

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with their utensils of every day life

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and really it started with a sketch of,

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of a series of slaves disemboweling 
a master with a soup ladle.

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My reference in my mind was the surgical 
theater paintings of Thomas Eakins.

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Overhead projectors created a space where

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the viewer’s shadow would also 
be projected into the scene

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so that maybe they would 
you know, become implicated.

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Overhead projectors are a didactic tool,

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they’re a schoolroom tool, so they’re about,

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I mean in my thinking they’re 
about conveying facts.

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The work that I do is about 
projecting fictions into those facts.

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I began to love the kind of self-promotion 
surrounding the work of the silhouette artist.

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You know they would have to uh,

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show up in different towns 
and advertise their skills

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and sometimes very overblown language 
describing their incredible skills,

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you know able to cut you know in, in uh,

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less than a minute you know, ten 
seconds for your, your sitting,

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for your likeness, accurate likenesses.

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And I also begun to question this 
whole idea of accurate likenesses.

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The work takes on this narrative structure,

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creates all the elements of the 
story and I just need the viewer,

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like an author needs a reader, you know, to 
fill-in the rest of the tension of the story.

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This is a book I made in 1997, 
called “Freedom: A Fable.

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A Curious Interpretation of the Wit 
of a Negress in Troubled Times.”

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The negress, as a term that I apply to myself,

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is a real and artificial construct.

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Everything I'm doing is trying to skirt 
the line between fiction and reality.

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It’s not just an examination of 
race relations in America today.

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I mean, that's a part of it.

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It's a part of being an 
African American woman artist,

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but it's about how do you make 
representations of your world,

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given what you've been given?