The New Yorker Festival Preview: Kara Walker

The twenty-second New Yorker Festival kicks off on Monday, welcoming audiences virtually and in person to panel discussions, musical performances, a film screening, and more. The youngest guest, the teen-age pop phenomenon Billie Eilish, is younger than the Festival itself; among her fellow-participants are best-selling authors, activist entertainers, and New York State’s pathbreaking attorney general. The first night concludes with one of the brightest stars in the art world, and the only Festival guest who has both been profiled in the magazine and created a pair of its covers.

As Hilton Als wrote, in 2007, Kara Walker is the mind behind “provocative—frequently incendiary—and racially charged images,” an artist whose work challenges viewers with its depictions of gender, sexuality, and slavery. Famous initially for her silhouette technique, which alludes to and subverts an earlier American style, Walker has imagined a vivid new way to hold the past to account. “Walker’s vision,” Als writes, “is of history as trompe-l’oeil. Things are not what they seem, because America is, literally, incredible, fantastic—a freak show that is almost impossible to watch, let alone to understand.”

In the years since that Profile, published when Walker was thirty-seven, the artist has ventured into new media and modes of expression. In 2014, she drew praise from Als for the latest example of her “gorgeously divisive work.” With her “sugar sphinx”—a sculpture of a “mammy” figure more than thirty-five feet high, at a soon-to-be-demolished factory in Williamsburg—Walker “shows up our assumptions,” Als writes. “Walker has made this servant monumental not only because she wants us to see her but so the sphinx can show us—so she can get in our face.”

Since the 2016 election, Walker has confronted the present, and its own myriad injustices, with growing directness. “In a first,” Andrea K. Scott wrote, of the artist’s show the following year, “Walker brings explicit allusions to current events into her pictures—from Trump and Ku Klux Klan goons to Trayvon Martin and riot-gear-clad police.” Shortly after the forty-fifth President was inaugurated, The New Yorker spotlighted “The Crossing,” Walker’s less heroic-looking take on “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

The recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Walker will be joined at The New Yorker Festival by Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, in Harlem. Golden, a former curator at the Whitney, made her own appearance in Als’s Profile of Walker, expressing both admiration for the artist’s candor and concern about the trouble it might cause. As they speak on Monday, Golden may be reminded of her words from 2007: “Sometimes, when we’re having a dialogue that’s meant for publication, I say to Kara, ‘Do you really want to say that?,’ and the answer is always yes.”