Kara Walker

“My work is really abject and self-effacing sometimes. I mean, it's big and overwrought, but it's just paper dolls, and it's kind of silly.”

“I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.”

“The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us - viewer and maker - in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.”

“I grew up partially around Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in that part of the country, there was always this aura of mythology and palpable sense of otherness about being a Southerner.”

“There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I w...”

“I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.”

“To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what's not working and challenge it. You riff on things.”

“I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stor...”

“I've seen people glaze over when they're confronted with racism, and there's nothing more, you know, damning and demeaning to having any kind of ideology than people just walking the walk an...”

“Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not.”

“I have no interest in making a work that doesn't elicit a feeling.”

“Sugar crystallizes something in our American soul. It is emblematic of all industrial processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White being equated with pure and 'true': it takes a lot o...”

“I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way f...”

“It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just...”

“A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the he...”

“I know that in my family there are histories of violence that are internal family things and that are oftentimes dealt with internally. By internally, I mean inside the family group, but als...”

“I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.”

“I don't think that my work is very moralistic - at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonising tendency, and I don't think visual work operates like that.”

“I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These a...”

“Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.”