Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

Start date: Saturday, July 5, 2008
Event is ongoing: Until Sunday, October 19, 2008

The first full-scale American museum survey of the work of Kara Walker opens at the Modern on July 5. The exhibition is organized by Philippe Vergne, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and Yasmil Raymond, Assistant Curator, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in close collaboration with the artist. My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love features works ranging from Walker’s signature black cut-paper silhouettes to film animations to more than one hundred works on paper.

Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained national and international recognition for her room-size tableaux depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation through the genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the American South before the Civil War, Walker’s compositions play off stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses, slaves, women, and children enact a subverted version of the past.

$4: Students with ID and Seniors (60+), $10: General (13 to Adult), Free: Children 12 and under, Free: Modern members