Word: walkerism
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...foot we're unsure of where the other falls. Similarly, we can't determine the relationship of blade to neck, the difference between "grazing" and "penetrating" so important to the woman's life and our understanding. These spatial contiguities are lost somewhere in the details of overlap which Walker's silhouettes refuse to disclose...
Turning to the installation as a whole, we're tempted to find some sequential continuity in the processional arrangement of figures Walker's title supports this literary drive, evoking the conventions of 19th century slave narratives: "Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found by Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored, 1997." Yet our search for narrative unity is frustrated by fragmentation, as all mythic histories and fantasies are. The figures run into each other, and we can hardly determine on which of the Carpenter Center...
Even on the level of scale, Walker distorts the niceties of hand-held, 19th century bourgeois silhouettes. The near full-scale images in her surreal world aren't genteel keepsakes or familiar racial epithets. Walker's anti-stereotypes wouldn't make good logos on syrup bottles or tidy punch-lines to racist jokes. Rather, the very icons designed to suppress and stigmatize blacks return magnified and grotesque to haunt our collective conscience. Most shocking of all, the pickaninnies have appropriated the garb of paper silhouettes, the charming craft of their mistress' reaction...
Ultimately, the figures and scenarios in Walker's mysterious, melancholy art don't provide the instant recognition that stereotypes require. Although she may toy with stereotypical tropes like hair texture as a signifier of race, close attention to visual detail distinguishes her subversive and exploratory project from an uncritical parroting of racial cliches...
Still, Saar and others argue that Walker's tremendous success in a predominately white art establishment demonstrates an insidious bias on the part of curators and collectors who embrace artists willing to "sell themselves down the river." While it may be true that many of today's well-known black artists, including David Hammons, Carrie Mae Weems and Glenn Ligon, all engage powerful stereotypes, they should be considered as part of a broader artistic trend...