Out of her shadows

“Everything about this picture is wrong,” says Kara Walker, recalling the image that launched her into a reexamination of herself as an artist. It was, she says, “sick pedophiliac voyeurism.”

In her early 20s at the time, Walker was between undergraduate and graduate school and, by her own account, was flailing about, trying to find her artistic identity. Then she saw a vintage photograph, circa 1900, of a young black woman in a tattered frock, holding up a fan. “Some class, eh?” read the caption on the commercial postcard, designed for a certain white audience with a contempt for the perceived pretensions of African Americans.

“It sent me reeling because there are so many potential voices in it,” says Walker, 35, sitting in her modest studio in the garment district of Manhattan. “What can she be thinking? There’s a kind of ventriloquism in it. It sent me back and forth, thinking how as an artist we react to images, how as a black woman with some conscience do I react to this kind of image? I was trying to figure out what exactly my own voice was, what was not being spoken about in my own work.”

Such thinking began to give her work a focus -- on racism, the American South and the conflicting images people carry deep within themselves. And she began to use the silhouettes for which she has become known, blowing the quaint, 19th century method of portraiture and illustration up to mural size. Except that Walker’s scenes, of white masters and black slaves set against the lush landscape of the antebellum South, are dystopian: People chisel, hatchet or grind up each other; they have sex in shocking combinations.

‘Drawing is like thinking’

Tall and lanky with a serene face and soft smile, Walker speaks in a low, self-conscious voice. She hesitates before answering a question, a tentativeness that contrasts with the black-and-white verve of her art. The studio is stripped down, she explains, because most of the work has been shipped out. Only one silhouette is tacked to a wall, of a stout black woman with an upraised arm holding something -- rolling pin? cleaver? -- that can no longer be discerned. In fact, the figure has been cut out and relocated, leaving the large sheet of black paper and its void. Residual drawing marks the edges of the space.

“The drawing is the basis of everything,” Walker says. “Drawing is like thinking or writing for me. This is how I can tell what is happening in this little morass of my imagination.” As she talks, she doodles. When she talks about King Cotton in “Kara E. Walker’s Song of the South,” the multimedia installation on view at the Gallery at REDCAT in Los Angeles, she sketches him. When mentioning her little cotton sprites, offspring of the miscegenation depicted in the accompanying film, she sketches one of the creatures.

It’s been a busy year. She installed a mural in a stairwell of the New School University in New York. Her dealer, Sikkema Jenkins, took a new mural, “Freedom Fighters for the Society of Forgotten Knowledge, Northern Domestic Scene, 2005,” to the Basel, Switzerland, art fair. And this summer, she created her film and performance for the REDCAT show, which obliquely refers to the Disney animation of 1946. She also teaches at Columbia University, where she is an associate professor of visual arts.

Eungie Joo, director of the REDCAT gallery, says she persuaded Walker to produce a new work for the gallery by urging her to do something experimental. The installation, a forest of full-size, standing cutouts of trees into which a viewer can step and watch videos shown on a loop, is unusual for Walker in that it incorporates moving images and steps away from the gallery walls to explore “the theatricality of space,” Joo says.

The longest video is an eight-part narrative shot on 16-millimeter film, “8 Possible Beginnings: or the Creation of African-America. A Moving Picture by the Young, Self-taught, Genius of the South K.E. Walker.”

“I wanted to retell the story of coming into being,” Walker says of this piece, “by using a few elements of the African American cosmology -- middle passage, slavery.” She also touches on the cohabitation of whites and blacks, sometimes shown dancing and having sex together. “There’s something about complicity and about abuse and wishes for a kind of wholeness and then something else about the storyteller,” she says.

With scratched frames and flickering illumination, the film is deliberately made to look antique. “Some of that was just fortunate processing,” she says. “Most of the flaws kept in the film were genuine flaws because they looked really nice.”

For the opening of the show last month, she came to Los Angeles to perform the companion shadow-figure show, moving the figures around against a backlit screen and providing a narrative with her own voice. She will repeat her performance at 6 p.m. Sunday.

Walker was born in Stockton and moved to Atlanta with her family when she was 13. “My golden years were in Stockton,” she says dryly. “Entering puberty and the South at the same time was sort of two traumas at once. I suddenly found myself in this place which was so much stranger than anything I could have dreamed up. I found a very definite separation. It was very black or white; there was no room for in-betweeners, people with mixed backgrounds.”

A fast start

At the Atlanta College of Art, Walker majored in painting and printmaking. She earned her master’s at Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. That fall, an installation at the Drawing Center in New York, a mural titled “Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart” caused heads to turn.

“Kara is one of those artists who came out of the gate knowing exactly what she was doing,” says Ann Philbin, then director of the Drawing Center and now director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. “She was barely out of art school, but her command of her technique and her clarity of vision were already breathtaking.”

Since then, Walker has had solo shows at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hammer Museum. In 1997, she became the youngest person to win a MacArthur Foundation award. This prompted protests from some who considered her work demeaning to blacks. Artist Betye Saar told the International Review of African American Art, “I have nothing against Kara except that I think she is young and foolish.” Saar called the work “very sexist and derogatory.”

Others disagreed: “The thing that struck me was the incredible scale of the wall pieces; they were cinematic in scope,” says independent curator Lisa Henry. “There’s the amazingly fluid and beautiful line of the silhouettes. In terms of craft, they are very striking and seductive.”

Henry adds, “Her work is in dialogue with the past and with history, and with the history of artistic mediums.”

Walker acknowledges a fixation on the past but says it is very much connected to the present. “The other aspect of my work has to do with the need or tendency to rehash and repeat and never quite let go of something you know you need to let go of. Just when you think you can let go, then New Orleans gets flooded, and thousands and thousands of black people suffer.”

Emotion comes into her voice as she compares the holding of hurricane evacuees, most of them black, in the Louisiana Superdome to the slave ships that brought their ancestors to this country. She decries “the absence of any regard for human beings and the treatment of human beings as articles of waste.”

After her September performance at REDCAT -- four days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast -- an audience member asked Walker what she thought about the situation in New Orleans. Still behind the scrim used in the performance, Walker let her theatrical persona answer, questioning whether the failure to aid and shelter storm victims had something to do with race. And she left it at that.

Reminded of how she let her alter ego reply, Walker says, “She can answer better than I can.”

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‘Kara E. Walker’s Song of the South’

Where: The Gallery at REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles

When: Noon to 6 p.m. or curtain time, except Sunday, when the artist will “activate” her installation with a shadow puppet performance from 6 to 9 p.m. in the gallery

Ends: Oct. 23

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 237-2800; www.redcat.org