REVIEW: Kara Walker, “Back of Hand” at the Poetry Foundation
Kara Walker, “Back of Hand" at the Poetry Foundation. Photo courtesy the Poetry Foundation.
REVIEW
Kara Walker, “Back of Hand”
Poetry Foundation
61 W Superior St.
Chicago, IL 60654
Feb 15-May 18, 2024
By Spencer Hutchinson
Kara Walker's new show currently up at the Poetry Foundation is quiet, meditative, discreet and a welcome and refreshing departure from the usually iconoclastic and intense work that those accustomed to Walker's output would be familiar with. “The title of the exhibition suggests a rebuff, a slap in the face, but also a familiarity, knowing something ‘like the back of your hand,” says the wall text of this exhibit. Back of Hand displays works on paper by the American artist that foreground her long-term engagement with both language and text.
Featuring excerpts from a handmade 2015 book comprising of a series of 11 type-written pages with ink and watercolor illustration under-glass vitrines, and the large-scale drawings The Ballad of How We Got Here and Feast of Famine, installed in the lobby, the exhibition contends directly with the contradictions of misremembered histories through Walker's pointed representation of the horrors beneath the antebellum South's genteel facades.
Kara Walker, “Back of Hand" at the Poetry Foundation. Photo by Spencer Hutchinson, courtesy the Poetry Foundation.
“Walker's influences are varied and vast, from the political sketches of Goya to the caricatures of Daumier to medieval books of hours,” explains the wall text, drawing as she does from sources of the deep European past to help construct a relatable mythological history of African people in the Southern United States. The Poetry Foundation is the perfect location for this language oriented narrational work. It invites the viewer to spend time with an output that is quiet and easily manageable in the intimate setting of the Foundation’s front lobby and library rather than a larger museum or gallery setting.
Kara Walker, “Back of Hand" at the Poetry Foundation. Photo by Spencer Hutchinson, courtesy the Poetry Foundation.
It is refreshing to see that an artist as highly profiled and prolific as Walker has been able to maintain a career that has seen many changes in the art world since her debut in the mid 1990s to show work that does not rely on bombast or spectacle, or any over the top tricks or gimmicks that we might expect from an artist of Walker's popularity and stature.
With two large drawings and three vitrines featuring excerpts from a manuscript of Walker's own creation, we are drawn back into a familiar world, the world of Kara, a resident of the South, daughter of Atlanta and Stone Mountain. We are transported by familiar themes: the beleaguered nature of black femininity, the legacy of the horrors of slavery and the antebellum South and Jim-Crow.
Kara Walker, “Back of Hand" at the Poetry Foundation. Photo by Spencer Hutchinson, courtesy the Poetry Foundation.
With her characteristic grotesquery, we are confronted this time with images that are much more personal and poignant, hewn from the artist's own hand using the conventional wet media of water color and ink as opposed to her characteristic black paper cut-outs (although one of the large drawings does feature one of her black paper cut-outs).
What we find in this show is again quiet consumption of work, but upon closer inspection reveals itself to be just as intense, poignant and heart-wrenching as the work that we’ve come to be familiar with from Walker over the past almost 30 years.
Spencer Hutchinson is a 2009 BFA Graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied Sound, Painting and New Media, and Poetry Editor of the Bridge Journal.
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