Kara Walker

Kara Walker is best known for large black cut-paper silhouettes that stage violent, satirical scenes about slavery, race, gender, and power. Works such as Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart use the look of 19th-century silhouettes to unsettle historical nostalgia.

In 2019, Walker created Fons Americanus for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in London. The fountain-like work referenced empire, the transatlantic slave trade, and public monuments rather than presenting a celebratory memorial.

A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was installed in 2014 at the former Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn. The huge sugar-coated sphinx figure connected the sugar trade to slavery, industrial labor, and racialized imagery.

Walker gained major attention in the 1990s and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. She was born in 1969, so that recognition came when she was still a young artist by museum-world standards.