Kara Walker Talks with Thelma Golden

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2021

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kara Walker is one of our most influential living artists. Walker won a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” grant) before she turned thirty, and became well known for her silhouettes, works constructed from cut black paper using a technique that refers to craft forms of the Victorian era. Walker has put modest materials to work to address very large concerns: the lived experience and historical legacy of American slavery. Though she often depicts the racial and sexual violence that went largely unspoken for centuries in the past, her work is aimed squarely at the modern world. “What I set out to do, in a way, worked too well,” she said, “which was to say, if I pretty everything up with hoop skirts and Southern belles then nobody will recognize that I’m talking about them. And then they didn’t! They said, ‘The past is so bad.’ But I’m not from the past. . . . I do live here now. And so do you.” Walker was interviewed at The New Yorker Festival by Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.5	When creative time, a public art organization, decided to place an exhibit inside the domino sugar refinery, it tapped artist Kara Walker. When she saw this 30,000
0:24.1	square foot space, she decided to reach into the building's past. Since coming to prominence,
0:30.3	the artist Kara Walker has asked us to deal with some of the most insidious parts of our history.
0:36.6	Walker became famous with paper cutouts in a style
0:39.4	that seemed Victorian. She borrowed racist imagery from a past century to explore race, gender,
0:46.7	violence, and power in our own time. But while the imagery may be painful, Walker's work is also
0:53.2	seductive, beautifully realized in forms
0:56.1	that are uniquely her own. She joined us last week at the New Yorker Festival for a conversation
1:01.5	with Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. They discussed
1:07.8	a work from a few years back, truly one-of-a-kind with the title
1:11.4	A Subtlete, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby.
1:15.0	It's a sphinx made in sugar constructed in a former sugar plan in Brooklyn.
1:20.0	It was 75 feet long, really monumental.
1:23.8	And as the sugar fermented, the smell also became monumental.
1:28.3	The line to see the work was sometimes hours long.
1:31.3	Here's Thelma Golden with Kara Walker.
1:34.3	So, the marvelous sugar baby very much seems to be a work on one hand which calls into a moment that I think you have been in for some years,
1:47.0	which is really intersects with the conversation in this moment about monument making, right?
1:54.0	So that your work seem to be in some ways responding to the effort towards monument, but in many ways creating a corrective in them.
2:04.4	But also a subtlety also feels as if it's a work
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.