The artist that I feel has the most impactful stance on combating the dominant narratives of Western Art history today is the artist, Kara Walker.  Kara Walker is one of the most profound American artists of her generation with artworks expressing her emotional struggle with the underlying truths behind social structure, violence and sexuality in western culture throughout history.  In her creations, she has used her artistic abilities to give racism a voice by increasing the visibility of marginalized African American culture.

The first piece that caught my attention on this subject was, The Means to an End…A Shadow Drama in Five Acts, and this piece is a significant example as to how Kara Walker combats the narratives of Western Art History.  In this piece, we can see a series of five panels, all in black and white, decorated with the silhouettes of six characters.  This piece includes subtle yet graphic representations of citizens of America, and how they have never been depicted. Kara does this as an attempt to reduce the image of people, taking away skin color, characteristics, and facial features so the viewer is not completely certain of who Kara Walker is depicting.  She does this in order for the audience to “deal with their own prejudices or fear or desires when they look at these images,”.  This is seen to be impactful on the audiences she displays them to.  Kara uses this work to have the viewer in-delve themselves into their subconscious mind to see whether or not the audience believes they have prejudice tendencies or not.  This assists with combating racism in Western Art culture due to the fact that Walker is bringing those subconscious thoughts to light. She is doing this in order for the public to reevaluate how African Americans were depicted for so long, and how it affects their everyday lives now.   

Another piece Kara Walker created that breaks down the typical norms of Western Art culture was, Consume, created in 1998. This work still sticks to the same artistic style Walker creates, using a white canvas and a black silhouette of two people.  In this painting, one person is significantly taller than the other; the tallest one being a women suckling her own breast, and the smaller one being a little boy suckling on the fallic shaped dress material of the women.  With this piece, Walker embellishes in the consumption of people as products of slave trade in the past, along with the consumption of breast milk in Walker’s versions of the Madonna lactans.  This piece is combating the flaws of Western Art culture due to the fact that Kara Walker is attempting to denote gender, ambiguity, and race.  By creating this piece, she is showing the boy performing a sexual act to “consume” the exotic female figure in front of him.  This goes along with previous notations of the white male having degrading stances on African American women and the “foreignness” of their appearance.  The message being interpreted in this piece exemplifies the subconscious mind of the viewer once again. Kara Walker not only uses her work to get her audience thinking however, she impacts her audience to go deep into their minds to discover what their true intentions and how wrong they may or may not be.  With these two pieces, Kara Walker recreates the social construction of Western Art culture. Walker takes down the normality of what once were dominant narratives to redevelop the intentions and thoughts of the future of our artistic world.  

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Sources

Art Center, Walker. Apr. 2005.Kara Walker. Art and Artists, Web.  https://walkerart.org/collections/artists/kara-walker

Schollaret, Jeanette. 2003. Silhouetted Stereotypes in the Art of Kara Walker. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Penguin Group.

Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois. 2004. Seeing the unspeakable: the art of Kara Walker. Durham: Duke University Press.