Image via Wikipedia"Is that a razor blade she's holding?"
This was my observant friend's first reaction when I shared my current reading material.
This week, I resumed reading a book that's been leaving impressions on just about all interactions that I've had lately--from workplace conversations about regional cultural climates to quieter moments of reflection about racism.
Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw's, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, has considered Walker's evolution as an artist while distilling the painful reality of racism at the same time. Furthermore, it discusses the formation of a global dialogue that can stir complex feelings about one's own identity. Chapter 4, "Censorship and Reception," was especially considerate in relating Walker's powerful imagery. While reading, I learned that even fellow artists have questioned Walker's "appropriateness," which brings up an important question: who do we ultimately answer to as individual artists, and how does a sense of community foster that?
A New York Times article summed up her uncategorizable presence as an African-American artist in the art industry, by noting:
Race dominates everything, yet within it Ms. Walker finds a chaos of contradictory ideas and emotions. She is single-minded in seeing racism as a reality, but of many minds about exactly how that reality plays out in the present and the past.
