Kara Walker

Kara Walker is a African American artist born in 1969. She is known for her stencil style art. She draws her art on black paper, cuts it out, and then sticks it onto white walls. Some of  the walls where she hangs her art on are concave.

 Her artwork is interesting to me and many others. In most of her silhouettes there are different levels. She does this by just placing some images higher than others.

Her art is mainly about America's racial and gender situations. “Most pieces have to do with exchanges of power and attempts to steal power away from others.”
 
Kara's work has another speciality, as most of her work now only lives in pictures. After her exhibitions, she then has the original peices destroyed.

For her inspiration she says it goes like this, “One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad’s lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: ‘I want to do that, too,’ and I pretty much decided then and there at age 2½ or 3 that I was an artist just like Dad.”

Kara is  currently living in New York, where she is a professor of visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University.