Social Inequality In Kara Walker's Work

Kara Walker’s work has received international attention since the early 1990’s for utilizing an iconic, but mostly forgotten, form of portraiture – the cutout silhouette. It has been a target of violent controversy, due in part to the obscenity of the portraits and to the reviving of deep-seated racial stereotypes. This controversy is, I argue, only partly a response to her body of work and more to her medium of choice: life size black cut-paper figures.
When asked to describe the basis of her art, Kara Walker gave a fiery remark: "The history of America is built on...inequality, this foundation of a racial inequality and a social inequality...and we buy into it. I mean, whiteness is just as artificial a construct as blackness is." She offers insight into the founding of these deep-seated racial stereotypes that her art attacks. Racial inequality and its roots in America is a heavy influence in her work. In fact, in the work’s title, “Gone” refers to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, a novel set in the antebellum and early civil war period. This was a time heavy with racial injustice.
Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, while being
On the contrary, it is only these intellectuals that can experience the true beauty in her work. Only a cultured individual can be seduced by the obscene, and offer it a second glance. John Constable put it best, in saying “There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, -- light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.” Kara Walker’s art is important because it isn’t created to comfort or coddle, but rather to inspire and upset; to add fuel to the fire of American