By Nicole D. Soley

 

 

It can be said that exterior factors always influence the creation of an artwork—in other words: artworks are always created within a certain context influenced by external factors.  These external factors can range from the artist’s personal experiences—background, economic status, race, etc.—to the environment in which a work is made and the materials the work is made with.  Some artists believe that these external factors play a significant role in determining a work’s meaning or intent and they embrace these factors in the art-making process.  Others refute the idea that these external factors should determine a work’s meaning and that the artist makes work independent from these factors.  Specifically there are conflicting views about how an artist would choose to identify with one specific external factor: their race.  Upon examination of several artists that struggle with how to identify with their race in their art-making practice, two groups emerge: those that feel it is their responsibility to engage racial discourse within their subject matter, and those that feel that their race is irrelevant in their art-making practice.

 

Several artists within the United States are grappling with the question of whether or not to align themselves with their race in their art making identity.  In Cleveland’s (2013) text entitled Black Art in Brazil: Expressions of Identity, artist Yinka Shonibare is questioned as to whether or not he “ha[s] a problem with being black.”  Shonibare responds that “he d[oes]n’t have a problem with being black, but he d[oes] have a problem with other people’s ideas of what being black should mean for his work” (Cleveland, 2013).  This response resonates with many contemporary artists making work within the United States. 

During a panel entitled “Printing Beyond the Blackness Principle: The Necessity of Multiple Subjectivities within Black Masculine Discourse” that took place on March 20, 2015 artists Noah Anderson and Leslie Smith III art historian Andrea Ferber discuss varying responses to addressing race in art making practices. Artist Leslie Smith III expresses the desire to have a conversation about solely his artwork and not a conversation about being a black man making art (Anderson, Ferber, & Smith, 2015).  The artist’s desire for a conversation that does not reflect racial boundaries within society is commonplace among artists making contemporary work.

 

A better understanding of his work illuminates Smith’s stance on addressing race in his artist identity.  Leslie Smith’s work is abstract and non representational.  His expressionist paintings, although they do not directly address race in the subject matter, do discuss the ideas of identity and stereotypes.  Smith (2015) explains during the panel that “[his] studio’s practice attempts to expand limited spheres of cultural, social, and political discourse.”  Smith criticizes the contemporary understanding of African American art.  He states “historically speaking, African American art thrives on a narrative structure, which simultaneously engages discourses of race, gender, and class.  Within this frame, many narratives fall short of universal perspectives.” Smith discusses different spheres: your sphere of self and the sphere that others put you in.  Smith argues that this affects whether or not you do what you want to be doing because of your expectations (Smith, 2015).  Smith may be addressing this in his non-representational work.  Smith’s work questions whether or not art must be steeped in the artist’s personal identity.  He proclaims during the panel (Smith, 2015) that work takes place in a “perceptual space of painting that does not exist” where solely art and abstraction can converse.  Smith intends for the viewer to define their own space in the painting by not giving the works titles and in turn only providing enough information for the viewer to understand that idea.  Largely, in his work, Smith challenges the viewer to shed their closely related histories and experiences while acknowledging their predispositions.  Smith intends to illustrate to the viewer that there are multiple ways of understanding existence (Smith, 2015).  In this way, Smith’s “avoidance” of including race in the subject matter of the work or within his own identity as an artist, results in his own way of addressing race in art making: creating work that houses multiple subjectivities, alike how he desires to be identified.  Smith (2015) explains during the panel that there is comfort in specificity: when a viewer can prescribe an identity to someone that is alike one that they already know, the viewer is comfortable.  If the identity of the artist is ambiguous, the viewer is more likely to feel discomfort.  During the panel, Smith also references his identity as a black man a part of a larger “iconic contemporary political blackness.”  It is this “fad,” so to speak, that Smith seeks to avoid.  Smith seeks an art making identity that is uninfluenced by specific, prescribed identities of being black in the United States.  Smith desires his audience to have “experiences that are all about the paintings and not about identities” (Smith, 2015).

 

By making work of abstraction, Smith can make work in a world free from racial and gendered discourse—or can he?  Members of the panel audience (2015) were quick to criticize Smith’s approach.  One audience member criticized his unwillingness to address his black self in his art making suggesting that ignoring the role of race in his work or identity is a form of irresponsibility to others alike and unlike himself (Smith, 2015).  This is a criticism many artists face when neglecting to discuss race directly in their art making.

 

Additionally, many artists may feel that in the contemporary art world within the United States that there isn’t room for multiple perspectives on “blackness” within an art historical context.  Andrea Ferber (2015), art history professor at Idaho State University, mentions during the panel the room for growth in the art history discourses of what it means to be a white artist, black artist, female artist, male artist—or, as well all know more likely to be true, an artist that identifies themselves in many of these categories.  Ferber claims that the art history world doesn’t always understand different experiences of blackness or maybe isn’t ready to (Ferber, 2015).  Within the United States it does sometimes seem as though art-making identities can be prescribed based on race, gender, or sexuality.  Perhaps this exists due to the pervasiveness of color blindness mentalities and the racialized history of the United States, or perhaps this is due to a “collective guilt” faced by the United State’s historical exploitation of black people in order to produce wealth that has resulted in an institutionalized way of perceiving and understanding “the black identity” rather than an inclusive understanding of multiple “black identities” (Anderson, Ferber, & Smith, 2015).  Likely the issue stems from a combination of complex factors.

 

Another viewpoint held by contemporary artists is that an artist’s art-making identity must address race or racial issues within their work.  Artists such as Kara Walker, Glenn Lygon, and Noel W. Anderson reflect this shared perspective as they grapple with discourses on race, racial tensions, and racist pasts and presents.  The subject matter within these artists’ works is pointed and symbolic.  The subject matter may seem to be the complete opposite of Smith’s work.

Artists that decide to create work that directly engages subject matter involved in the discourse of race may see themselves differently than those that make work somewhat more “intentionally distanced” from the self.  However, both groups of artists can see themselves as catalysts for cultural change.  Both groups of artists are contributing to the national and international discourse or race and identity and neither can be seen as correct or incorrect.  Thelma Golden (2009) discusses the idea of artists as contributors to cultural change in her TED Talk entitled “How art gives shape to cultural change.”  Her “interest is in artists who understand and rewrite history; who think about themselves within the narrative of the larger world of art, but who have created new places for us to see and understand.”  Golden identifies Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon as such artists (2009).  For the sake of this essay, Kara Walker will be discussed as an artist that grapples with identity and race within her artwork.  Kara Walker is by no means the only artist addressing or contemplating race within identity in her work; however, Walker features a wide range of publications discussing the matters of race and identity, which happen to suit the discourse of this essay.  One must remember that Walker is not the sole artist featuring a racial discourse, nor should she be regarded as such.  Within this essay, Walker will provide a strong framework for an artist grappling with race and identity within contemporary visual art and discourse will be framed using Walker’s work and life.

 

Kara Walker As A Catalyst for Social Consciousness and Change

Walker is an artist who “understand[s] and rewrite[s] history” and who “think[s] about [her]self within the narrative of the larger world of art, but who [also has] created new places for us to see and understand (Golden, 2009).  Walker, within her acknowledgement of race in her work, demonstrates her role as an artist that is a part of the present through participating in creating and navigating a present day narrative.  Furthermore, Walker’s participation within this narrative helps others to develop a greater understanding of the present.  Golden reminds us that this understanding of the present is evoked by good contemporary artwork:

[It is] not always just simply about the aesthetic innovation that their minds imagine—that their visions create and put out there in the world but perhaps more importantly through the excitement of the community they create as important voices that would allow us right not to understand our situation as well as in the future.” (2009) 

 

Walker states her intention in understanding her world in order to make work that represents it in an Art 21 (2003) series film entitled Stories:

It’s not just an examination of race relations in America today—I mean, that’s a part of it.  It’s part of being an African American woman artist, but it’s about: how do you make representations of your world given what you’ve been given.

 

Several authors are in agreement with this idea of Walker as a catalyst for change and social consciousness.  Riché Richardson (2009) in his article entitled “Old South and New Terrors” argues that Walker’s work is powerful in how it reveals and deconstructs social structures.  “Walker’s work holds up a mirror to the contemporary American political and popular scheme, revealing its suffusion of anxieties and ambivalences related to race, region, gender, and sexuality” (p. 53).  In the act of holding up that “mirror” to the nation, Walker helps others to greater understand these structures and to think deeply about them.  David Wall, (2010) author of “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” argues that not only does Walker’s work demand attention to the American systems in place, but it also “transgresses” visual codes while also attacking structures.  Wall states in regard to Walker’s work:

The transgression of visual codes is never merely an aesthetic event.  As all cultural domains are ‘continually structured, legitimated, and dissolved’ in respect of each other, to transgress the dominant modes of visual representation is to simultaneously attack ‘the cultural scripts and social structures that shape them’” (p. 281). 

Walker addresses race in her own identity as well as in the contemporary “sphere” [a term well-suited for this discussion borrowed from the SGCI Printmaking Conference in Knoxville, TN 2015] of visual art in order to attack social structures and subliminally create change in social consciousness about race in the United States. 

 

Physiognomy in Relationship to the Silhouette and Racial Representation

Walker participates in the contemporary narrative regarding racial issues through her examinations of physiognomy within her silhouette work. In Steel Stillman’s (2011) article entitled “In the Studio: Kara Walker,” the artist discusses the original research behind her silhouette work: “I began researching what having a black body meant in art historical terms” Walker explains.  “From there,” the artist continues, “I followed a branching network of clues that linked early American art, various folk or ‘second-class’ art traditions and work made by black artists of the 19th and 20th centuries” (p. 90-91).  From there, Walker began to explore her research through image appropriation and printmaking (Stillman, 2011). After this exploration, Walker begins to create silhouettes to explore the relationships between assumptions of identity and external features.  Walker’s way of addressing identity through a simplified or “edited” form—a silhouette—establishes an examination of this way of prescribing identity from an outward appearance.  Kara Walker explains in an interview with Stillman (2011), “One day while drawing, I was thinking about physiognomy—the notion that identity can be divined from external appearances—when it occurred to me that identity was more likely to be revealed by editing away external assumptions” (p. 91).   Although the external assumptions are edited away, the viewer can still prescribe an identity to the figure based upon the silhouettes of the figure’s features: hair, nose, or lips.  The silhouette it seems, although the premise is to hide or “edit away external assumptions,” these assumptions continue to exist even in silhouette form.  Walker’s approach subverts the notion that identity can be prescribed based on outward appearance while also reinforcing it.

 

Walker’s use of the silhouette references troublesome periods in history and in that approach complicates Walker’s work and reinforces her work’s relevance, as well as her artist identity’s relevance to a contemporary narrative.  Utilizing the silhouette as a way to portray race, Walker references both historical past and contemporary remnants of that past.  Wall (2010) states “Continuing to wrestle, as she has done, with the dark gothic underbelly of the American fabric, her work manages to engage the taboo-laden territory of racial representation and, in doing so, forces an unsettling confrontation with images of violence and depravity and the repeated transgression of sexual, social, and racial codes” (p. 277).  Walker’s silhouettes force viewers to confront the present images, which are loaded with “taboo.”  By confronting this, Walker reasserts her work’s relevance in the “rewriting” of history she is participating in.  Contributing to this rewriting and re-contextualizing of imagery, Walker’s silhouettes hold subtle reference to an oppressive past.   Richardson, (2009) author of “Old South and New Terrors,” discusses Walker’s use of the silhouette in relationship to the Enlightenment.  Richardson regards Walker’s “approach” in her use of the “classic silhouette form” as “subversive” and “ironic.”  “Furthermore,” Richardson states, “through her style, Walker reveals the inherent irony in the popularity of the black silhouette among Europeans for portraying the human form during the Enlightenment, a period when black bodies were dehumanized and associated with inferiority in the prevailing philosophical discourse” (2009, p. 56).  Richardson’s examination of Walker’s reference to the European use of the black silhouette during a time “when black bodies were dehumanized and associated with inferiority” illustrates how Walker’s facility with the silhouette creates complex discourses through which discussions of race can occur.  Walker’s choice in representing her subject matter through the use of the silhouette rewrites contemporary history through its examination of identity assigned through external appearances as well as its reference to the past.

 

Using Fiction and History En Route for Unveiling a Contemporary Truth

In employing the silhouette form, Walker complicates fictional places and questions the defining lines between fact and fiction.  Walker may be using the silhouette as a means to protect her identity or to distance herself from the work.  Within Art 21’s (2003) film entitled Stories, Walker discusses her use of the silhouette as an “avoidance of the subject.”  Walker, therefore, is employing the silhouette forms as a means to uncomplicated subject matter while loading it with complexities simultaneously. The distance appears to be used as her way of facilitating her discourse on race.  Additionally, Walker utilizes the silhouette to blur the line between fact and fiction.  According to Walker in Art 21 (2003), Walker’s work also enters the realm of fiction by using imagery that is prettier or “gentle”.  Walker states: “[with] most of my work …the illusion is that it is about past events, the illusion is that it is about a particular point in history and nothing else” (2003).  Walker’s statement illustrates how the viewer dates the imagery and how the audience perceives the imagery to be relevant or not relevant in a contemporary realm.  Walker, however, employs these fictional qualities utilizing a pretty or “gentle” aesthetic in order to contemplate fictional, historical, and contemporary boundaries themselves.  Walker explores historical and contemporary contexts within a fictional narrative in order to convey both ambiguity and pointedness simultaneously within her racial discourse.  Walker explains to Stillman (2011): “there are facts and experiences at the root of most race issues—hard to get to, but there—around which layers of hyperbole and fiction grow” (p. 92).  With this in mind, Walker alludes to these “facts and experiences” within her fictional, yet true, narrative.  In this way, Walker can facilitate a commentary on social structures and race related issues through her use of seemingly fictional narrative that is in fact, anything but.  It is as if Walker utilizes fiction as a medium within her work.  Walker explains in the Stillman interview (2011), “to be an artist is to fictionalize.  Making work that connects to Gone with the Wind or The Clansman is a matter of weaving fictions around other fictions—trying, by subversive means, to approach another truth” (p. 92).  Walker’s fictions then, which are informed by historical and contemporary fact and fictions, are multilayered and constructed to ascend upon “another truth,” perhaps one in which race issues are not ignored or suppressed.   

 

Identity, Stereotyping, and Social Structures in the South

Walker’s examination of identity assigned by others because of an individual’s external appearance addresses race and through this magnifies and examines social structures in order to create change.  Walker’s work addresses the South’s power in determining identities for the region and the nationally within the United States according to an individual’s race.  Richardson (2009) explains: “Kara Walker’s multifaceted repertoire, provides one of the most intimate and provocative engagements with the history of the South in the United States in contemporary art and is useful for anyone invested in thinking about how the region shapes race, gender, class, and sexuality in the national and global context” (p. 49).  The South is not simply where the United States housed part of its darkest history, but it is also where many of the existing national social issues of the present day were born and nourished.  Walker utilizes this birthplace and its relationship to the nation as a whole as a way to “provoke” discourse regarding race both historically and in the present day.  Walker also realizes the region’s role in shaping the identities of individuals and groups through structural stereotyping.  Richardson refers to the “persisting ways in which raced and gendered politics crystallize in the U.S. South, but reverberate nationally and globally.  Furthermore…[this region holds] potential…to catalyze mass movements in the post-civil rights era, or even to engender civil and human rights movements in this new millennium” (p. 50).  Richardson’s article reflects the affluence the region has in determining Southern and national perceptions on race among other identifiers. 

 

Walker’s experiences in the South reflect how the region’s affluence in identity shaping influenced her life and, as a result, her work.  Walker explains her experiences with stereotyping in the South in the Stillman interview (2011): “Georgia never felt quite normal to me; overt racism from whites was not uncommon.  And expectations for a black girl were more limited than they had been in California.  I didn’t have the language to understand it at first, but I could sense the difference in the way people treated me… It took me years to acknowledge how insidious and effective the stereotyping was within the black community” (p. 90).  Walker’s reflection illustrates how others, both whites and blacks in the South, decided what she could do and what she couldn’t based upon her identity as an African American woman.  In the South, her external appearance determined her identity; her identity determined what sort of power she had due to structures in place and stereotyping.  Walker employs the “loaded” nature of these identity stereotypes within her work in order to evoke critical response from the viewer.  In Stories (2003) Walker explains “what black stands for in a white America and what white stands for in black America are all loaded with our deepest psychological perversions, and fears, and longings” (Art 21).  Walker utilizes these assumptions or prescribed identities to complicate the subject matter and engage the viewer in a critical analysis of what these identities might mean on a personal, community, and national level.  Walker is intentional about the inclusion of forms that will evoke these “perversions, fears, and longings” in order to encourage examination. 

 

There are many factors that contribute to an identity.  Identities can be very much externally informed.  Walker’s work examines the role in which race plays in this construction with specific attention given to how racial identities are formed in the South. The stereotyping structures that are in place in the South and reverberated on a national level are ones that are historically established in the region.  Richardson (2009) explains how Walker’s art reflects how “Southern-based ideologies become national and global, linking the violence and terror of traumas such as slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, including rape and lynching, to forms of violence and containment in the global arena in the contemporary era” (p. 49).  Richardson examines how Southern ideologies are both historically founded and contemporarily rooted.  The stereotypes that exist today are a result of the South’s violent and painful past.  Identities are prescribed today based upon pervasive Southern ideologies that link racism with power structures. Walker’s work makes these connections apparent.  The connections between Southern ideologies, stereotyping, and structural inequities become apparent through Walker’s work.  Richardson (2009) argues that “to think about the South as recurrently and as boldly as Walker does in her art seems especially compelling in light of persisting material disparities in the region that are steeped in racial inequalities and related to housing, health, education, employment, voting rights, and the environment among other issues” (p. 50).  The material disparities then inform the power structure inequities which inform the stereotypes which contribute to the cyclical nature of the problems themselves.  Walker’s work addresses these types of identities in her work.  Walker’s work exhibits the idea that the way the South prescribes identities based on race become national and global due to the affluence of the region’s power and history.  Richardson (2009) mentions that Walker’s images:

…may cut very deeply for a region often still steeped in denying, or worse, rationalizing, aspects of its history.  It is interesting that Walker’s art makes statements about the history of the U.S. South, including the Civil War, that are otherwise virtually nonexistent and inadmissible not only in the region, but also in mainstream media.  Many contemporary popular films that invoke the history of the South, in spite of some visionary elements, have not escaped the pitfall of Southern nostalgia, and even evince confederate glorification.  By featuring such imagery as Southern plantations in the contemporary era and using it as a backdrop for a range of cultural and social dynamics, Walker’s work, at a more general level, reminds us that the slave trade itself was a multilayered enterprise of national and global proportions with continuing significance.  It concretely illustrates how the U.S. South serves as a gateway for the globalization of culture in our time” (p. 59).

 

Examination, Magnification, and Empowerment

Walker defends her position as an artist participating in and navigating a complex contemporary context through her discourse in which to discuss contemporary social issues through the examination and magnification of social issues and empowerment of minimized voices.  Walker’s work magnifies social issues where they exists and empowers where it seeks to empower.  Richardson (2009) examines Walker’s magnification and empowerment in regards to race relations.  He states:

In a nation where an epidemic of visual violence is pervasive, from fashion runways to television sitcoms, that either unapologetically marginalize or exclude black bodies altogether, it seems especially significant that Walker’s art gives black bodies iconic force, shows us why they matter, and visually represents their inescapability and desirability.  Whereas many narratives of race in the media deny or minimize black pain, Walker’s art emphasizes it.  Walker visualizes narratives of black rape and abuse that the media persistently denies and even ignores altogether.  Whereas the South’s contemporary plantation tourism tends to downplay the history of slavery, Walker’s art magnifies it. (p. 50)

Walker, in this manner, empowers black bodies by “magnifying” a nation’s dark history.  Walker’s drawing of attention to these discourses through her work empowers those who may otherwise be silent or powerless.  Additionally, Richardson (2009) states that Walker is not afraid to tackle difficult “history or memories that some of us would rather not think about, or would prefer to forget altogether” (p. 56).  Walker behaves the same way in regard to contemporary contexts.  Walker is able to recontextualize imagery to connect with difficult pasts for her contemporary purpose to examine social issues.  Richardson states:

Walker’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 demonstrates this “potential” of art “to facilitate dialogues on pressing social concerns”: “Many of the images that she includes feature boats of various sizes, from small rowboats to steamboats to slave ships, and make reference to the Middle Passage.  Her images force us to visit historical scenes related to slavery and by implication, relate the benign neglect of the black populace in New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane to the expendability of the black body in the South within the economies of slavery and Jim Crow and its subjection to forms of violence, including rape, lynching, and annihilation.” (p. 57)

 

Walker’s work responds to the disaster in a way that resurfaces the dark histories which created the current social conditions.  The work demands that this is acknowledged when considering the people that were neglected during the disaster.  Walker is able to recontextualize imagery or subject matter derived from the Deep South in order to examine other social concerns such as the War on Terror. Richardson (2009) states:

Linking historical sexualized forms of violence and terror against black women during and after slavery to state-sanctioned atrocities against women in the contemporary era that occur in the global context in relation to the War on Terror.  The day-to-day forms of terror in the lives of those living in communities ravaged by war illustrate that such women and children are as vulnerable to abuse as they were during the era of American slavery.  The terror of the Old South and the War on Terror emerge here as correlative. (p. 58).

 

By employing subject matter that exemplifies social injustices enforced by terror in the Old South, Walker is able to negotiate an examination of social injustices in regard to the War on Terror.  Her work addresses not a specific kind of terror in regard to whom it affects, but a universal terror that is used to maintain skewed power structures.  As Richardson has helped me to demonstrate, the power that Walker facilitates over historical and contemporary subject matter reinforces the idea that Walker is a significant and meaningful contemporary artist addressing race in order to inform the broader social consciousness of a nation.

 

Criticism and Conflict

Walker has received much criticism regarding her work.  Richardson (2009) states that “[Walker’s] art has been harshly criticized by those who accuse her of trafficking in stereotypes or pandering to pathologies of blackness mainly for white audiences” (p. 50).  This criticism reflects the conflicting views of identity held among primarily African-American artists.  Walker chooses to engage in dialogue about race and social injustice within the United States.  Many artists do not feel that this facilitates a constructive dialogue about race.  Many, in fact, would argue that Walker’s work perpetuates the stereotypes rather than criticizing them. Wall (2010) states:

This sudden celebrity caused some consternation among a constituency of (mostly) African-American artists, of whom the two most well known and outspoken were Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell.  Saar’s response was to undertake a let-writing protest campaign that condemned any public display of Walker’s ‘derogatory and racist’ work.  Pindell, for her part, delivered a paper at the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale in which she accused Walker of ‘catering to the bestial fantasies about black culture created by white supremacy and racism.’ (277)

 These opponents illustrate the differences in opinion regarding addressing race within Walker’s work.

 

Conclusion

Walker establishes herself as an artist participating in rewriting history and instating social consciousness and change.  Walker does so through employing silhouettes that are based in research on physiognomy in order to address race within a historical and contemporary framework.  It is through the use of silhouettes within a fictional narrative that Walker critiques social structures in order to reach a new truth.  Walker’s work can be examined to interpret and understand how identity is shaped through social structures.  In this way, Walker’s work magnifies social issues, examines them, and empowers voices that are typically silenced.  Walker has much to say about what she has gathered about her situation.  The nation’s future can look to Walker’s work to understand her perception.  That generation then can create progress for future generations by building off of Walker’s narrative.  With any artist, it is not about the individual or the work they produce, it is about the community that views the work, feels the work, and allows the work to shape and cultivate their own perspectives.  Thelma Golden stated while explaining her most recently curated exhibitions: “for me it’s about considering the implications…of what this generation has to say to the rest of us…what it means for these artists to be both out in the world as their work travels, but in their communities as people who are seeing and thinking about the issues that face us” (2009).   

 

References

Alfredson, A., & Desai, D. (2012). Colour and silent racism.  Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 1(3), 183-194.

Anderson, N. W., Smith III, L., & Ferber, A. Printing beyond the blackness principle: The necessity of multiple subjectivities within black masculine disciplines. Southern Graphics Conference International panel, March 20, 2015.

Art21, Inc. (2003, September 9).  Stories [video file]. Retrieved April 12, 2015, from http://video.pbs.org/video/1237715781/

Berwick, C. (2011, May 2). Stranger in America: Glenn Ligon. Art in America. Retrieved from http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/glenn-ligon/

Cleveland, K. L.  (2013).  Black art in Brazil: Expressions of identity.  Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

Golden, T. (2009, February) How art gives shape to cultural change [TED Talk]. Retrieved April 14, 2015 from http://www.ted.com/talks/thelma_golden_how_art_gives_shape_to_cultural_change#t-622305

Newton, T. (2011, July) Embracing otherness, embracing myself [TED Talk].  Retrieved April 14, 2015 from http://www.ted.com/talks/thandie_newton_embracing_otherness_embracing_myself/transcript?language=en#t-307000

Oguibe, O. (2004). The culture game.  Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Patel, H. (2013, June) Who am I? Think again [TED Talk]. Retrieved April 14, 2015 from http://www.ted.com/talks/hetain_patel_who_am_i_think_again

Reeder, L. K. (2015, January). Kara Walker: Subtlety as a big idea. Art Education, issue no., 51-58.

Richardson, R. (2009). Old South and new terrors. Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, 25, 48-59. doi: 10.1215/10757163-2009-25-48

Stillman, S. (2011). In the studio: Kara Walker. Art in America, 99(5), 88-95.

Wall, D. (2010). Transgression, excess, and the violence of looking in the art of Kara Walker. Oxford Art Journal, 33(3), 277-299.