Kara Walker: ‘There is a moment in life where one becomes black’

[struggle4progress]

Tim Adams
Sunday 27 September 2015 02.00 EDT

Kara Walker had her first major success as an artist with her intricate and compulsive black-and-white paper silhouettes of imagined scenes from slave history in the American south. In 1994, her room-size mural, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, won her international acclaim, and made her at 27 one of the youngest ever recipients of a MacArthur “genius” grant ...

I was talking about confederate emblems to a friend, a photographer. This has been a big topic of conversation since the nine African American churchgoers were shot in South Carolina and I happened to mention that there is this mountain that I grew up in the shadow of, kind of literally. The mountain was claimed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 as their spiritual birthplace and the carving was proposed in 1916. It was finally completed in 1972. So we came down to photograph it, and this show arose out of that ...

.... I thought maybe Atlanta will pay attention if I have a show about Atlanta in London ...

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/27/kara-walker-interview-victoria-miro-gallery-atlanta