Art Metropole

#14631

Kara Walker: A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be

Artist

Kara Walker

Date

2021

Publisher

JRP|Editions

Format

Monographs

ISBN

9783037645574

Size

21.5 × 27 × 2.5 cm

Length

600 pp

Genre

Black Art & Artists, Contemporary Art

This gorgeous 600-page volume, with a printed cloth-over-paper binding, provides an exciting opportunity to delve into the creative process of Kara Walker, one of the most celebrated artists working in the United States today. Primarily recognized for her monumental installations, Walker also works with ink, graphite and collage to create pieces that demonstrate her continued engagement with her own identity as an artist, an African American, a woman and a mother.

More than 700 works on paper created between 1992 and 2020—which are reproduced in print for the first time from the artist’s own strictly guarded private archive—are collected in this volume, thus capturing Walker’s career with an unprecedented level of intimacy. Since the early 1990s, the foundation of her artistic production has been drawing and working on paper in various ways.

Walker’s completed large-format pieces are presented among typewritten notes on index cards and dream journal entries; sketches and studies for pieces appear alongside collages. The result is a volume that allows readers to become eyewitnesses to the genesis of Walker’s art and the transformative power of the figures and narratives she has created over the course of her career.