Shades Of Meaning -- Kara Walker Uses Silhouettes To Tell Stories Of Race, Slavery, Desire, Fantasy, Identity And Power

The show that opens today at The Henry Art Gallery is a sensational stew of race, slavery, sex, desire, identity, history, fantasy, miscegenation, parody, stereotypes, scatological references, the meaning of power and the definition of oppression. There's also pedophilia and bestiality.

There is a lynching and casual violence, which is rendered all the more horrific because of its cartoon-like presentation. A young girl holds a jagged-edge knife at the neck of a woman. Another girl seems to be floating casually to the ground, lynched by the bag she has just used to pick cotton.

The exhibition is by Kara Walker, a 28-year-old African-American, Providence, R.I.-based artist who in her short career has already shot into stardom. She is also one of the most intentionally provocative artists on the contemporary scene. The spellbinding, difficult-to-digest, sometimes blatantly humorous show of Walker's work at The Henry is preceded by a notice at the museum's entry warning that some exhibits in the museum may not be appropriate for all audiences.

Though the museum says it has decided to leave the notice up permanently, it is not surprising that it is Walker's exhibition that prompted the new warning policy. Walker's work makes nearly everyone squirm.

She's had one-woman shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and The Renaissance Society, a cutting-edge visual-arts center affiliated with the

University of Chicago. Her work has been acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Earlier this year she won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, one of the prestigious, no-strings-attached awards commonly called "genius grants." The exhibition at the Henry was organized by the Renaissance Society and is owned by a private collector.

Walker's format is the silhouette, an ironic choice. The black paper cutouts were last popular as an art form in the mid-19th century, when they were used to create flattering, well-mannered profiles of middle-and upper-class patrons.

The 18th and 19th centuries also provide the historical setting for Walker's phantasmagorical scenes. Her images of cotton plants, Spanish-moss-heavy tree limbs, hoop skirts and barefoot slaves are straight out of the antebellum South.

Her imagery is part dime-store bodice ripper, part nightmare. This is "Gone With the Wind" gone amok; the perverse flip side of the mythology of slavery and racial stereotypes. Walker's point, to be sure, is that though the fantasy worlds she portrays come from her imagination, the stereotypes and mythologies remain a part of today's world.

Wicked humor

(Walker, who will not be in Seattle for the show because she is about to have a child, obviously has a wicked, in-your-face sense of humor, despite her serious themes. She insisted that the flier sent out by The Henry resemble a poster for a 19th-century minstrel show. Walker wrote all the copy for the faux poster, including the announcement that the exhibition was "Created Entirely By a Young Negress of Unusual Ability." The Henry has already received one call from a museum member who found the flier racist.)

Like a Freudian psychoanalyst, Walker wants to subject submerged fantasies - her own and those of an all-too race-aware America - to the bright light of day. In print, she has been quoted as saying that although she grew up in a middle-class, comfortable Atlanta home, "I was overcome by the need to re-create race-based conflict, a need to feel a certain amount of pain . . ."

Walker continues: "So in keeping with a tradition of explorers and artists who made concrete images of historic events without having ever participated in them, I set out to document the journey. Only problem is that I am too aware of the role of my overzealous imagination interfering in the basic facts of history, so in a way my work is about the sincere attempt to write `Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl' and winding up with `Mandingo' instead."

With her life-sized silhouettes, which she cuts out of the black paper used by professional photographers for backdrops, Walker creates gallery-sized installations, that, in aesthetic terms, are lovely. The paper silhouettes are lightly waxed and, at The Henry, have been pressed onto the walls of the East Gallery like a mural wrapping around the walls of the room.

Sweet on the surface. . .

Walker's use of positive and negative space is highly graphic and can cause optical illusions. Affixed to the white walls, her cutouts of tree branches literally seem to be magically suspended in mid-air. And at first blush, the installation is sweet, quaint, even funny if you don't look too closely.

In one central image a couple in fancy dress is dancing. It's dignified, romantic, pleasant - a ballroom scene from an old movie. But look again and it seems that the couple are African Americans. In Walker's world, they are slaves who've somehow changed places with the masters. Closer inspection reveals that animal tails are growing from the woman's stylish gown. Even though she's switched places with the white mistress, she's still an animal, still a slave of racial stereotypes.

In another portion of the installation a black woman, her head bound in a kerchief, turns a key protruding from the back of a black man. Tears or drool or blood drips from his eyes and mouth. He hunches over a banjo. When she winds him up like a toy soldier he'll play the banjo. He'll be transformed into a minstrel-show performer, a happy-go-lucky cotton-field musician.

Elsewhere, a young black girl seems to be drifting down from the sky in a cotton bag that's turned into a parachute, or is it a hangman's noose? Cotton balls float to the ground around her.

Over in the corner, a black man in formal, Napoleonic military dress sprints as if to battle with a shovel in his hand. The plume on his impressive hat tells us he is important. Perhaps he is Marcus Garvey. But what is he heading toward in such a hurry? In Walker's scene he is running with his shovel toward a pile of excrement being produced by a woman who sits naked on top of it.

There are two telling images that work as bookends. And they are among the most powerful in the exhibition. In the beginning of the show, an African-American woman holds a thread and needle while a young black girl prepares to slice the head off the white plantation mistress. In the final silhouette, a black woman skips lightly off into a field, a graceful, joyful image. Except that the head of the white woman is perched, perhaps sewn, atop her own.

Is this about revenge? Is it the yearning of the slave woman to become the white mistress? Or is it about a fantasy that requires the African-American woman to become something other than what she is before she can skip off into a happy life?

Walker's work is a Rorschach test for everyone who takes the time to look. Despite the graphic power of her images, she is intentionally apolitical and ambiguous about shame and blame. There is no political correctness in her work. White people are cruel, stupid and morally mangled. Black people are lascivious, dim-witted and casually violent. Everyone has an interest in bodily functions that would've impressed even the Marquis de Sade.

Those who'd rather not be confronted by such images should pay heed to the notice at The Henry's front door. Others will find this one of the most truly thought-provoking and original shows to be seen in Seattle in a very long time.

Besides tonight's lecture on Kara Walker there are several other talks upcoming on the exhibition: -- At 7 p.m. on Oct. 9, Seattle artist Barbara Thomas will lead an informal talk about the work at the museum. The event is free with admission to the museum. -- At 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 6, U.W. professor and novelist Charles Johnson will discuss his writing and Walker works in the museum. Tickets are $15, $10 for museum members and students.

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More information

Kara Walker, an installation, at the Henry Art Gallery, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., through Nov. 30. Hours are Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesdays and Thursdays until 8 p.m. There will be an opening night lecture today at the museum auditorium at 7:30 p.m. Called "Pain, Pleasure, Parody: The Art of Kara Walker," it will be given by Hamza Walker (no relation to the artist), education director at The Renaissance Society, Chicago, which organized the show. Tickets to the lecture are $6, $4 for museum members and students. Info: 543-2281.