KARA WALKER: The Psychlorama, you know,
was a major phenomenon in the 19th century,
but it's just before cinema, you know.
It's round.
So you enter into this rotunda that's lit.
It's like the peak of the painter's creative enterprise, you know,
to make the painting surround the viewer
and to create the illusion of depth and of space
and to lure the viewer into the feeling of being a part of the scene.
[Brazilian teacher]: Is there only one story being told here?
It seems each figure comprises a story.
At the same time, we’re in a round room?
Does the story have a beginning or end?
Most of my work is, the illusion is that it’s about past events.
The illusion is that it’s simply about a particular point in history and nothing else.
And it’s really part of the ruse that I tend to like to
approach the complexities of my own life by distancing myself
and finding a parallel in something prettier
and more uh, genteel,
like that picture of the Old South that’s a stereotype.
I had started to read the book Gone With the Wind
and was thrilled, with how, you know,
engrossing that story was,
and how grotesque it was at the same time…
the romance of it, the storytelling,
it was so rich and epic and that was what I hadn't expected.
I hadn't expected to be titillated in the way that, you know,
stories like that are meant to titillate.
It was so much fodder for the work that I wanted to do.
The distressing part was always being caught up
in the voice of the heroine, Scarlet O'Hara.
Scarlet, in her desperation is, you know,
digging up dried-up roots and tubers down by the slaves’ quarters
and she's overcome by a "niggery" scent?
and vomits?
And it's scenes like that, that you know,
might go washed over by the sort of vast, epic structure of the story,
but that is an epic moment.
A lot of my work has been about the unexpected…
that kind of wanting to be the heroine
and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.
And, that kind of dilemma, that push and pull,
is the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make.
The silhouette lends itself to, you know,
avoidance of the subject, you know, not being able to look at it directly.
My earliest memory of uh, wanting to be an artist–
uh, I was three, I was sitting on my dad’s lap
and he was drawing in his studio
which was the garage of our house in Stockton, California.
And I remember thinking to myself that I,
I wanted to do what he did.
And he used to give me chalk to draw on the sidewalk,
and you know he would you know document my creations.
When we moved from California to Georgia,
I know that I was having nightmares about moving to the South.
You know, the South already was a place loaded with,
like I said, mythology, but also a reality of, you know, viciousness.
It was just such a frightening prospect,
to be sort of borderline between child and teenager
and going into an environment where black kids are being targeted.
Stone Mountain, Georgia is where I did most of my growing up.
It’s like a Mount Rushmore type of thing, of the confederate heroes.
That is pretty significant.
Stone Mountain was a haven for the Ku Klux Klan.
So that place had a little bit more resonance.
It was just so in your face.
There was no real hiding the fact.
You know, what black stands for in white America,
what white stands for in white America are all loaded with
our deepest psychological perversions and fears and longings.
Most of the pieces, I guess, have to do with exchanges of power,
attempts to steal power away from others.
I was tracing outlines of…
of profiles you know thinking about uh, uh,
uh, physiognomy and racist sciences and minstrelsy
and the shadow and, and the dark side of the soul.
And and I thought well you know I’ve got black paper here
and I was making silhouette paintings but they weren’t the same thing.
And, and it seemed like the most obvious answer,
it took me forever to come to, just,
just to make a cut in the surface of this black thing.
You know I had this black paper and if I just made a cut in it,
I was creating a hole, you know and it was like the whole world was in there for me.
I've always been interested in the melodramatic,
in outrageous gestures. I love history paintings…
this artistic, painterly conceit,
which is to make a painting a stage,
and to think of your characters, your portraits or whomever,
as characters on that stage…
and to freeze-frame a moment that is full of pain and blood
and guts and drama and glory.
This work is two parts research and one part paranoid hysteria.
It’s called “INSURRECTION.
Our tools were rudimentary, yet we pressed on”…
an image of a slave revolt in the antebellum south uh,
where the house slaves got after their master
with their utensils of every day life
and really it started with a sketch of,
of a series of slaves disemboweling a master with a soup ladle.
My reference in my mind was the surgical theater paintings of Thomas Eakins.
Overhead projectors created a space where
the viewer’s shadow would also be projected into the scene
so that maybe they would you know, become implicated.
Overhead projectors are a didactic tool,
they’re a schoolroom tool, so they’re about,
I mean in my thinking they’re about conveying facts.
The work that I do is about projecting fictions into those facts.
I began to love the kind of self-promotion surrounding the work of the silhouette artist.
You know they would have to uh,
show up in different towns and advertise their skills
and sometimes very overblown language describing their incredible skills,
you know able to cut you know in, in uh,
less than a minute you know, ten seconds for your, your sitting,
for your likeness, accurate likenesses.
And I also begun to question this whole idea of accurate likenesses.
The work takes on this narrative structure,
creates all the elements of the story and I just need the viewer,
like an author needs a reader, you know, to fill-in the rest of the tension of the story.
This is a book I made in 1997, called “Freedom: A Fable.
A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times.”
The negress, as a term that I apply to myself,
is a real and artificial construct.
Everything I'm doing is trying to skirt the line between fiction and reality.
It’s not just an examination of race relations in America today.
I mean, that's a part of it.
It's a part of being an African American woman artist,
but it's about how do you make representations of your world,
given what you've been given?