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Quote by Kara Walker

“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.”

Quote by Kara Walker

Author

Kara Walker is an American artist known for her large-scale black-and-white silhouette works that often depict the history of slavery and racial relations in the United States. Her work merges elements of history, art, and performance to challenge traditional narratives of memory and storytelling. more

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“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. That kind of dilemma—that push and pull—is the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make.”

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“There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist.”

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Author:Kara Walker

“Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about.”

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“I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without the 'struggle?'”

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“Sugar crystallizes something in our American Soul. It is emblematic of all Industrial Processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White Being equated with pure and ‘true’ it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.”

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“I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful”

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“Sometimes the painting starts to relate very directly to either sights seen or experiences felt, other times it just goes off on a tangent that you really can’t articulate.”

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“Some of the pictures are truly mysterious to me.. which is why I so often say publicly that I don't know or don't care what they're really about. And yet I can also say that the paintings are prayers.. that they have to do with whatever it is that makes you want more than what daily life affords.”

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“What I do know is, in little more than 30 years, we have gone from a nation where the “quiet enjoyment” of one’s private property was a sacred right, to a day when the so-called property “owner” faces a hovering hoard of taxmen and regulators threatening to lien, foreclose, and “go to auction” at the first sign of private defiance of their collective will ... a relationship between government and private property rights which my dictionary defines as “fascism.””

“Nut cases only succeed in multiple killings when they can be confident their prospective victims are disarmed.”

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