I am performing this role of the artist and this role of the 'negress' coming into a white-box institution. It's kind of a self-appointed role: the self-designated negress.
Kara WalkerRead
It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the artist's passion for their work, emphasizing the complexity and emotional depth involved in creating art.
Kara Walker's quote reveals her deep connection to the artistic process, describing how she engages with both the joys and challenges of creativity. She compares her work to a game, highlighting its playful yet serious nature, and suggests that her artistic endeavors are not merely for entertainment, but to illustrate profound truths and confront difficult themes such as darkness and struggle.
Themes
ArtCreativityPassionEmotionComplexity
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about the role of emotional depth in art.
More from Kara Walker
All quotes →There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist.
Kara WalkerRead
I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful
Kara WalkerRead
Sugar crystallizes something in our American Soul. It is emblematic of all Industrial Processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White Being equated with pure and ‘true’ it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.
Kara WalkerRead
I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.
Kara WalkerRead
Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.
Kara WalkerRead
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I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible, because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal.
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You live the life of a dancer. It is not your job, it is your life, and you have to love it so much to be able to take it every day for six days a week, sometimes seven.
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The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that's where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don't come home your best self.
George SaundersRead