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The slim, soft-spoken woman stylishly turned out in a long, gray knit skirt and orange zip-front sweater certainly doesn't come across as this season's firebrand. Yet 29-year-old Kara Walker, who is black, is the surprised and hurt target of attacks from the African American community for her work, which is primarily wall installations using cutout black-paper silhouettes of racial stereotypes, such as mammies and minstrels. Her current installation at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, commissioned by Capp Street Project in Oakland, where it was seen last spring, is again raising heat in the community.
While she has been much lauded by the art establishment, which is largely white, the strong criticism of Walker first came about after the 1997 announcement that she had won a MacArthur Foundation grant. Many in the black community spoke out, saying that they have been offended by the artist's stereotypical depictions of blacks in servitude, especially young black women, shown as sexually voracious or abusive.
Walker contends that she is showing such images to explore what the world is like for blacks living in America today. It represents, she says, "my experience of the world being post-integration. Part of what distinguishes [my] generation of very young people is that we had to invent another sort of black experience. We were given black pride, Black History Month, multicultural studies in school. I felt that a lot of what I was told to feel about being an African American woman was coming through civil rights documentaries or melodramas like 'Roots.' Yet, not too long ago, black people were being lynched. There is something very palpable about this."
The exploration of these images, Walker says, is a personal one: "I started to deal with the cyclical nature of things. I think it's always more difficult to go to the deep, dark heart of yourself and...