Author: Walker, Kara
Title: Kara Walker: After the Deluge
Description: New York, Rizzoli, 2007. Hardcover. A black and red casebound book. There is a dust jacket with the title in pink on a white spine. Pages: (6), 7-118, (1). Profusely illustrated with a majority color images. "After the deluge is a grandiloquent phrase that has been bandied about in the news and popular discourse since the floodwaters receded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Here the term has been appropriated by Kara Walker, a contemporary artist known for her satires of slave life in the antebellum south. This book is an attempt to vivify the empty spaces disasters (waterborne or otherwise) leave in their wake and examine the historical/mythological precedents for images of Water, 'the Africanist presence' (as Toni Morrison terms it in her seminal essay 'Playing in the dark') embodied in those images, and the shadow at that intersection where the real melts into fiction"--Jacket. "Here I have gathered images from the distant and relatively recent past. All of the historical paintings and my images and typewritten texts predate the recent hurricanes, tsunamis, and to some extent, the global concern over rising sea levels. Paintings are neat containers of ideas about the commonplace nature of disaster. The genre painters featured in this book bring to the surface a subjective mix of terror, wish fulfillment, and mundane observation that is sometimes lost in a photography-driven world. I created this book because I was tired of seeing news images of (Black) people suffering presented as though it were a fresh, new thrilling subject. I brought together the art in this book (and the exhibition that preceded it) thinking like a draughtsman, perhaps absurdly so, as even the typewritten texts are from an ongoing series of text pieces I think of as drawings. The book is a series of thoughts of or related tangentially to Hurricane Katrina, and floods to come. It is a rumination on a fear of the deep and the problem of the shallow--'skin deep.' The book is the result of thinking like a Black woman, perhaps absurdly so, because to be 'Black' in the context of the book means broad sweeps of types of representation: stereotypical, archetypal, Negro, African, the color of nighttime, the color of cut paper, the feeling of engulfment, the sense of humor, the style of outrage. This is a book of pictures, pictures of things which engage our pleasure centers." Contents are as follows: Murky -- Deep-rooted traditions -- Chocolate city -- Port of call -- Middle passages -- Savagery -- Sea -- The failure of containment -- Inundation -- Going under -- Darkness -- Black -- The whiteness of the wall -- Superdome -- Extraction -- Digestion -- Portents. VG/VG: Exlibrary book. Sticker on dust jacket at the base of the spine. Stamp on title page. Stamp on copyright page. Sticker on back pasted end page.

Keywords: American Artists ; Walker, Kara ; ;


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