RELIGIOUS ART | NEWS OF WEEK -- Kara Walker

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton

Kara Walker, Allegory of the Obama Years by Kara E. Walker (2019). © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Our entire sector will be harmed by COVID-19, but the gravest harm will be to the hourly workers at our museums, and none more than people of color. Recent research suggests that 55% of those hospitalized will be black compared to 26% of whites. Also, too many of these low-wage workers, who are disproportionately people of color, do not have sick-leave or insurance. However, there is hope because arts worker-based relief is being created by local arts advocates. Such Obama-like hope, "as dark clouds close in," makes Kara Walker our artist of the week.

Making Miami's Art Scene with Collector Jorge M Pérez

SOTHEBY'S

Jorge M. Perez with Kara Walker's "Securing a Motherland Should Have Been Sufficient" (2016) 

Billionaire real estate developer and philanthropist Jorge M Pérez has erected gleaming towers in cities throughout the world, and his name is attached to the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the flagship contemporary art museum in his adopted hometown. But at the moment, his pride and joy is a squat two-story warehouse building called El Espacio 23, in a little-known industrial area of the city. An experimental arts center inaugurated in December, it is the culmination of a great American success story – one which began overseas. Pérez’s career as an art collector was born out of a desire to stay connected to his homeland. “After I finished school when I decided to stay in the US, I had a lot of nostalgia for Latin America and was looking for my roots,” he says. [More]

Kara Walker traces slavery’s bitter legacy with new ways of drawing

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Roberta Smith

Ms. Walker’s “Christ’s Entry into Journalism,” sumi ink and collage on paper. The images here are not exclusively contemporary — note a man resembling the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the lower left corner — but they implicate current events. Credit Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

NEW YORK---Like most outstanding artists, Kara Walker is unrelenting. In a press statement for her latest show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., she wrote in her familiar, mock-serious yet dead-serious tone that she was “tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model’ ” and of “being a featured member of my racial group and/or gender niche.” But Ms. Walker’s desire to stand down from the demands of her particular brand of fame has not made her stand down in her art, which is as disturbing and challenging as ever, if not more so. The show is a brawl of works on paper that has as much the feeling of a studio visit as an exhibition. Through Oct. 14, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 530 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-929-2262, sikkemajenkinsco.com. [More]

Kara Walker Show at Cleveland Museum of Art Links Slavery, Black Lives Matter and Christian Martyrdom

THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
By Steven Litt

A detail of Kara Walker's "Easter Parade in the Old Country,'' on view in the exhibition "The Ecstasy of St. Kara" at the Cleveland Museum of Art, through Saturday, Dec. 31.

OHIO -- The Cleveland Museum of Art has no official position on the Black Lives Matter movement. But the museum's new show on the work of Kara Walker, which opens today, highlights connections the acclaimed American artist sees between religion, slavery, martyrdom and the use of lethal force by police, which has inspired protests nationwide, including in Cleveland. Walker became fascinated by the depiction of martyrs and saints alongside actual physical relics, which caused in her "a slippery sensation of revulsion and realness" that made her consider "whether we must carry the rotting bodies of the fallen through the streets."[link]