Who

Known for her life-size installations of paper silhouettes, Walker's arresting work explores race, gender, and violence.

Backstory

Raised in an artistic family, Walker spent her childhood in Stockton, California and later moved to Atlanta after her father, abstract painter Larry Walker, took a job as director of the school of art at Georgia State University. Forging an identity as a quiet girl devoted to art, and deeply influenced by her surroundings—she lived in Stone Mountain, the cited birthplace of the Klu Klux Klan—Walker went on to study painting and printmaking at the Atlanta College of Art before moving north to earn her MFA from RISD. As a grad student she became obsessed with images from colonial history and began experimenting with her signature style: silhouettes evoking themes of slavery and brutality. 

Walker made a splash on the art scene in 1994, at the age of 24, when her work debuted at the Drawing Center in SoHo: She was offered a 50-foot wall to exhibit on and she used the entire surface to glue up black and white paper images, a panoramic technique that became a Walker trademark. A few years later her exhibition at Wooster Gardens, in which her life-size silhouettes depicted a surreal and fantastical version of plantation life, earned her the embrace of art critics; then in 1997, still in her twenties, she was included in the Whitney Biennial. Walker continues to turn out new work, and also occasionally teaches at Columbia.

Of note

Nightmarish but visually beautiful, Walker's large scale and multi-medium installations feature outrageous images of sodomy, pedophilia, and ravaged, distorted or severed bodies, and play with antebellum folklore and racial stereotypes, eliciting a discomforting range of reactions in spectators. "Kara's work," says Thelma Golden, "takes from fact but also fantasy and throws on its head any notion we might have of good and bad, right and wrong, black and white." Walker's pieces—which sell for up to $300,000—have been on display at the MoMA, Guggenheim, and Whitney, and she's one of the few modern artists included in the Met's permanent collection. In 2006, the museum hosted "After the Deluge," which examined the impact of Hurricane Katrina by juxtaposing Walker's art with pieces from the museum's permanent collection. In 2007, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis presented her first major retrospective, titled "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," which opened at the Whitney in October 2007 and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2008.

Trophy case

Walker earned a MacArthur "genius" grant at the age of 27 in 1997, making her youngest recipient of the award in history.

Drama

Needless to say, Walker's work has long provoked intense debate. While most prominent critics have praised her—Roberta Smith of the Times has said her work conveys the way that "slavery visited degradation equally on all concerned and that its tragic legacy poisons life for all Americans"—others disagree. Noted sculptor Betye Saar condemned Walker's work as "revolting and negative… betrayal to the slaves," and led a letter-writing campaign against the artist in the late 1990s. Cultural conservatives have sniped that Walker produces the sort of politically correct "victim art" that liberal art aficionados eat up.

Personal

Walker is married to German jewelry designer Klaus Burgel, with whom she's collaborated on a number of pieces. They have one daughter, Octavia, and live on the Upper West Side.