Darkytown Rebellion
Darkytown Rebellion. Kara Walker. 2001 C.E. Cut paper and projection on wall.
tests the participant’s tolerance for imagery that occupies the nebulous space between racism and race affirmation.
Here, a brilliant pattern of colors washes over a wall full of silhouettes enacting a dramatic rebellion, giving the viewer the unforgettable experience of stepping into a work of art. Walker’s talent is not about creating controversy for its own sake, but building a world that unleashes horrors even as it seduces viewers.
This ensemble, made up of over a dozen characters, plays out a nightmarish scene on a single plane: one figure stands upright over his severed limb, despite his bleeding leg stump, with bones protruding from his hips; another figure, also exhibiting a severed limb, rolls on his back; a woman with a bonnet and voluminous hoop skirt may be attacking a smaller figure on its back, perhaps a crying baby, with a long, plunger-like instrument.
What is most remarkable about these scenes is how much each silhouettes conceals. Without interior detail, the viewer can lose the information needed to determine gender; the color projections, whose abstract shapes recall the 1960s liquid light shows projected with psychedelic music, heighten the surreality of the scene.
Walker is a well-rounded multimedia artist, having begun her career in painting and expanded into film as well as works on paper. The layering she achieves with the color projections and silhouettes in Darkytown Rebellion anticipates her later work with shadow puppet films.
Walker is one of several African-American women who use art to engage with and challenge visualizations of race within popular culture
Darkytown Rebellion reflects on the historical representation of African Americans in American visual culture.
Darkytown Rebellion is also born from a desire to translate the past into visual form. Walker
Through Darkytown Rebellion, Walker is not attempting to correct a late-nineteenth century depiction of African-Americans but rather to broach a discussion: are these merely images from the past or do these caricatures still resonate in the twenty-first century?
Though Darkytown Rebellion is full of shapes lacking detail, Walker reserves sharp outlines for faces and limbs. Walker’s silhouettes are (mostly) full-bodied figures, captured in various poses from the traditional profile, to a three-quarter turn, to full frontal. This plurality of poses, often in a single body, is another example of obscured detail within the silhouette tradition: here not only is the face absent, but the body’s action is also ambiguous.
Walker’s figures overflow these boundaries, whether through graphic violence or metaphorically, in terms of subject matter.
Though the title suggests a historical event, both the original nineteenth-century painting and Walker’s response are visual inventions rather than documents in a traditional sense. Walker enjoys this ambiguity between history and fiction
Darkytown Rebellion does not attempt to stitch together facts, but rather to create something more potent, to imagine the unimaginable brutalities of an era in a single glance.
tests the participant’s tolerance for imagery that occupies the nebulous space between racism and race affirmation.
Here, a brilliant pattern of colors washes over a wall full of silhouettes enacting a dramatic rebellion, giving the viewer the unforgettable experience of stepping into a work of art. Walker’s talent is not about creating controversy for its own sake, but building a world that unleashes horrors even as it seduces viewers.
This ensemble, made up of over a dozen characters, plays out a nightmarish scene on a single plane: one figure stands upright over his severed limb, despite his bleeding leg stump, with bones protruding from his hips; another figure, also exhibiting a severed limb, rolls on his back; a woman with a bonnet and voluminous hoop skirt may be attacking a smaller figure on its back, perhaps a crying baby, with a long, plunger-like instrument.
What is most remarkable about these scenes is how much each silhouettes conceals. Without interior detail, the viewer can lose the information needed to determine gender; the color projections, whose abstract shapes recall the 1960s liquid light shows projected with psychedelic music, heighten the surreality of the scene.
Walker is a well-rounded multimedia artist, having begun her career in painting and expanded into film as well as works on paper. The layering she achieves with the color projections and silhouettes in Darkytown Rebellion anticipates her later work with shadow puppet films.
Walker is one of several African-American women who use art to engage with and challenge visualizations of race within popular culture
Darkytown Rebellion reflects on the historical representation of African Americans in American visual culture.
Darkytown Rebellion is also born from a desire to translate the past into visual form. Walker
Through Darkytown Rebellion, Walker is not attempting to correct a late-nineteenth century depiction of African-Americans but rather to broach a discussion: are these merely images from the past or do these caricatures still resonate in the twenty-first century?
Though Darkytown Rebellion is full of shapes lacking detail, Walker reserves sharp outlines for faces and limbs. Walker’s silhouettes are (mostly) full-bodied figures, captured in various poses from the traditional profile, to a three-quarter turn, to full frontal. This plurality of poses, often in a single body, is another example of obscured detail within the silhouette tradition: here not only is the face absent, but the body’s action is also ambiguous.
Walker’s figures overflow these boundaries, whether through graphic violence or metaphorically, in terms of subject matter.
Though the title suggests a historical event, both the original nineteenth-century painting and Walker’s response are visual inventions rather than documents in a traditional sense. Walker enjoys this ambiguity between history and fiction
Darkytown Rebellion does not attempt to stitch together facts, but rather to create something more potent, to imagine the unimaginable brutalities of an era in a single glance.