Kara Walker

"Playing on its associations with caricature and with the pseudo-science of physiognomy ... [Walker] turns it into a powerful medium for evoking the complexity of slavery ... includes watercolors, prints, drawings, and projected installations as well as life-sized silhouettes ... includes nearly seventy examples of her work in a variety of media"--Dustjacket. Kara Walker creates vivid and shocking evocations, rooted in stereotypes, of an antebellum world that comments on the system of slavery and its continuing legacy in the American consciousness. In her choice of black cut-paper silhouettes, Walker takes a medium that was extremely fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as part of the neoclassical revival, when the silhouetted images on ancient Greek and Roman vases were emulated on such goods as Wedgwood ware. The silhouette was a parlor art practiced by genteel ladies and gentlemen, who created portraits, landscapes, and decorative motifs. There were also traveling silhouettists who took their craft around the country. The 18th- and 19th-century silhouette was also associated with the pseudo-science of physiognomy, which held that one could analyze psychological