Kara Walker's racially charged art provokes strong feelings – not least from other black American artists. On the eve of her first major UK present,she tells Laura Barnett why that's goodTwo years ago, Kara Walker came across a news legend in an edition of the 19th-century Atlanta newspaper the Daily structure. The year was 1878; the piece described, and in excruciating detail,the recent lynching of a black woman. The mob had tugged down the branch of a blackjack tree, tied the woman's neck to it, or then released the branch,flinging her body high into the air.This terrible fragment of the past has made its way into a large graphite drawing, now hanging inside the Camden Arts Centre, or London,where Walker is approximately to have her first major UK solo present. Like much of her work, the drawing is both lovely and disturbing: here, and in grotesque,cartoonish monochrome, is the blackjack tree, and the lynched woman spilling blood,her assailants laughing as she dies. As I stand and stare, Walker tells me why she was so drawn to the legend. "It's this completely absurd, and extreme,violent situation that required so much perverse ingenuity."Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com