This exhibit the first comprehensive presentation of this remarkable African American artist’s career. Walker has risen to international prominence for visually stunning works that challenge conventional narratives of American history and the antebellum South. With biting humor, the artist comments on race, slavery and liberation, sexual attraction and exploitation, discrimination, and modernity.

A silhouette is a view of an object or scene consisting of the outline and a featureless interior, with the silhouetted object usually being black. The term was initially applied in the 18th century to portraits or other pictorial representations cut from thin black card.

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. She received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. The artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery, creating a theatrical space in which her unruly cut-paper characters fornicate and inflict violence on one another.

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, British colonists of all ranks were experiencing a consumer revolution. For the gentry, more substantial houses based on English Georgian architecture rose in the landscape. Inside colonial households, British imported goods were abundant. These goods—textiles, furniture, and even table forks—made possible the pursuit of an ideal of refinement and an appearance of gentility in the colonists' everyday lives. Exotic beverages such as coffee, tea, and chocolate arrived in seventeenth-century Europe and soon became available in the colonies.

From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves.

The earliest known silhouette was probably of William and Mary done by Elizabeth Pyburg in the late seventeenth-century England. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were numerous well-known English silhouettists who usually painted their subjects onto a variety of substrates such as ivory and plaster. These artists include John Field, Isabella Robinson Beetham, John Miers, and Charles Rosenberg. The most well-known silhouettist of all was undoubtedly French-born Edouart, who worked in England and the United States. The silhouette also flourished in other parts of Europe.

Panoramic paintings are massive artworks that reveal a wide, all-encompassing view of a particular subject, often a landscape, military battle, or historical event. They became especially popular in the 19th Century in Europe and the United States. A few have survived into the 21st Century and are on public display.

Tawana Brawley (born 1972) is an African American woman from Wappingers Falls, New York. In 1987, at the age of 15, she received national media attention in the US for accusing six white men of rape, some of whom were police officers. The accusations soon earned her notoriety, which was inflamed by Brawley's advisers Reverend Al Sharpton and attorneys Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, public officials, and intense media attention.

The Harlem Renaissance (also known as the Black Literary Renaissance and the New Negro Movement) refers to the flowering of African American cultural and intellectual life during the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology The New Negro edited by Alain Locke. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States.

Kara Walker’s most recent video installation, …calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea, I was transported, has recently been jointly acquired by the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Gerrit Lansing and artist Kara Walker in conversation on the WPS1.org broadcast boat during the 2007 Venice Biennale (15 minutes).

The Darfur Conflict refers to violence taking place in Darfur, Sudan. The conflict started in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in Darfur took up arms, accusing the government of oppressing black Africans in favour of Arabs. There are various estimates on the number of human casualties. One side of the armed conflicts is composed mainly of the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed, a Sudanese militia group recruited mostly from the Afro-Arab Abbala tribes of the northern Rizeigat region in Sudan.

Oscar Devereaux Micheaux (2 January 1884 – 25 March 1951) was an American author and film director. Although predated by the short lived Lincoln Motion Picture Company that put out smaller films, he is regarded as the first African-American feature filmmaker.

...Micheaux often cast his actors for their reputation in the Negro community. Robeson, the minister's son, is here cast as minister, the Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins. In actual fact, Isaiah is a scoundrel, an ex-convict setting out to get as much money from the church as he can, as well as debauching the pure Isabelle (Mercedes Gilbert), daughter of a mother too blinded by her faith to see through the wiles of the "man of God".

Tamango is a 1958 film directed by John Berry, a black-listed American director who exiled himself to Europe. Dorothy Dandridge stars in the film. Based on the short story by Prosper Mérimée, the film is about a slave ship rebellion. Also starring Curt Jurgens and Alex Cressan, the film was banned in certain parts of the country because of the interracial love scenes with Dorothy and Curt Jurgens.

Beloved is a film based on Toni Morrison's eponymous Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1987 novel. It was directed by Jonathan Demme, and was produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions. The film stars Winfrey and Danny Glover.

The Atlanta child murders, known locally simply as the "missing and murdered children case", were a series of murders committed in Atlanta, Georgia, United States from the summer of 1979 until the spring of 1981. Over the two year period, a minimum of twenty-nine black children, adolescents and adults were killed.

On November 5, 1980, United States Attorney General Benjamin R. Civiletti directed the FBI to participate in the investigation of several missing and murdered children in Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to working an independent investigation, the FBI collaborated with the local law enforcement Task Force to provide additional manpower, guidance and technical assistance. Ultimately, on February 27, 1982, Wayne Bertram Williams was found guilty on two counts of murder in the Fulton County Superior Court, Atlanta, Georgia. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

Text plus 4 double-page exquisitely detailed black card pop-up silhouette illustrations by Kara Walker (one with moveable image tab). The pop-up images were specially laser-cut in black card to achieve a level of detail impossible with traditional die-cut technology.

Betye Irene Saar (July 30, 1926 in Los Angeles, California) is an American artist, known for her work in the field of assemblage. Her education included a time at the University of California, Los Angeles, from where she received a degree in design in 1949, and graduate studies in printmaking and education at Pasadena City College, California State University, Long Beach, from 1958 to 1962. Her interest in assemblage was inspired by a 1968 exhibition by Joseph Cornell, though she also cites the influence of Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, which she witnessed being built in her childhood.

Elizabeth Catlett Mora (born April 15, 1915) is an American sculptor and printmaker. Catlett is best known for the black, expressionistic sculptures and prints she produced during the 1960s and 1970s, which are seen as politically charged.

This Web site is an educational resource developed in conjunction with the Walker Art Center exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, the first full-scale U.S. museum survey of the work of American artist Kara Walker. The site, designed for educators at the high school and college levels, general museum visitors, and community group leaders, can be used to both prepare for viewing the exhibition and to engage groups in dialogue about the artist's work.