Courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum
Kara Walker's "Anything But Civil," at the Saint Louis Art Museum
"Confederate Prisoners Being Conducted from Jonesborough to Atlanta," from the portfolio "Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)," 2005, Kara Walker, from the exhibition "Anything But Civil."
Right this moment, Kara Walker is best known for her enormous, temporary public artwork—A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. In May, two months before the shuttered factory in New York’s Bushwick neighborhood was torn down to make way for luxury condos, Creative Time commissioned Walker to make a piece inside it. So she and a team of workers “confected” a 75-foot-long, 35-foot-high mammy sphinx from 160,000 pounds of sugar, surrounding her with resin statues of slave boys drenched in molasses.The sphinx was Instagrammed thousands of times; people lined up for blocks to see it. The social-media chatter revolved as much around the overwhelmingly sweet scent inside the building—molasses still drips from the walls—as it did around the art itself.
But the art did get talked about, along with the topics Walker often tackles in her work: slavery, violence, history, sexuality, and race. Those concerns are front and center in Anything but Civil, her current exhibit on view in the Saint Louis Art Museum’s Galleries 234 and 235. Using enlarged engravings from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (published in 1866, a year after the war ended), Walker “annotates” the pages with her signature black silhouettes. She’s described the prints in this portfolio as “the landscapes that I imagine exist in the back of my somewhat more austere wall pieces.” They’re austere in that Walker’s known for working with the most minimal of color schemes. But as New York Times critic Holland Cotter once noted, Walker may stick to the use of just black and white, but her work is rarely simple.
“Anything but Civil: Kara Walker’s Vision of the Old South,” runs through August 10 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts, Forest Park. Admission is free. Museum hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Tue–Sun, 10 a.m.–9 p.m. Fri. For more information, call 314-721-0072 or visit slam.org.
