Emancipation Approximation, scene #5

Since the 1990s, African–American artist Kara Walker has forged a reputation for confronting, large-scale installations of paper cut-outs that depict scenes of slavery from the American Deep South. Walker employs the popular nineteenth-century pictorial convention of the silhouette to explore disturbing subject matter, commenting about the form:
‘The silhouette says a lot with very little information but that’s also what the stereotype does’. Her fictitious characters, drawn from slave narratives, explore racial and gender stereotypes. Walker’s engagement with sexual and racial taboos draws the viewer into a disturbing world, one where the legacy of the past is felt in the present. This screenprint belongs to the series Emancipation Approximation, which evolved from Walker’s large paper cut-out installation at the 1999 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

Maria Zagala, Curator Prints, Drawings and Photographs