Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw: So Walker is an artist who has been well known for a long time for the large wall-size silhouettes, silhouette installations, cut paper pasted on the walls. Cut black paper, most often, but also sometimes in white or in gray, etcetera. But she also works in a number of different media, from sculpture to printmaking to kind of theatrical things and film, etcetera. And the pieces that are in the collection are a suite of prints. They’re different sizes and they all work together in a kind of a complicated way to talk about the history of the Middle Passage and slavery in the New World, not just in the United States, not just in what we tend to call “America” but in the Americas as a whole. And one of the great powers of Walker’s work is the ability to tap into not just an actual history, but our own personal interpretations and understandings and connections to that history and kind of misunderstandings about history and creating history for ourselves. Often people don’t like what she shows. You know, there’s been tremendous kind of reaction, negative reaction to Walker’s work because it can be very disturbing. Like the Joyce Scott piece it can be very upsetting for people to look at things and for certain audiences, to look and not see a counter, not see an other story and to want to have, particularly I think for some African-American viewers to want to have not just these very painful images, images which are often very provocative and conflicting, but to have images that are positive and that are-- that talk about the achievements of African-Americans, the kind of the struggle under enslavement of both enslaved people, freed people and free-born people. And but Walker’s work is a part of that, it’s a part of how we understand the past in this moment and it’s a part of, I think, in many ways artists, African-American artists, African-American women artists coming of age fully and being able to do whatever they want to do and show whatever they feel they need to show through their work and whether it’s expressing something personal, expressing something social, political, historical and being able to do that in an unfettered way and to be celebrated for that. I think the fact that Walker has never been shy and has never been reticent I find incredibly heartening for all artists.
Music Credit: Excerpt of "Some Are More Equal" composed and performed by Paul Rucker and Hans Teuber from their album, Oil. Courtesy of Paul Rucker.
For more info, check out his site at paulrucker.com
