# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BUh0NiThpQI
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16046938-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/6d1db7921f.jpg
- **Posted:** 2017-05-25T20:15:18.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Every Thursday, we are sharing our favorite books about drawing and artists working in the medium. “Silhouettes are reductions, and racial stereotypes are also reductions of actual human beings.” - Kara Walker

Kara Walker’s work examines race, gender, and identity. “The Ecstasy of St. Kara” was the catalog released in 2016 to accompany her newest series of large-scale drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The drawings stem from her consideration of monuments and notions of permanence and impermanence following her massive public art project: ”A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant”. Sited in the industrial relics of Brooklyn’s legendary Domino Sugar factory, Walker’s installation -- a massive, sugar-coated sphinx-like woman -- responded to the building and its history.

The exhibition offered an extensive examination of how Walker envisions the rise and fall of society. The artist produced single, triptych, and five-part pieces that dive into the hyper-religious aspect of southern living that was used to justify slavery as a humane practice. The book is accompanied by an essay by John Lansdowne addressing the topic of Christian iconography and its relationship to Walker’s new drawings; a text by the artist considering her work within the recent political climate, and a poem by Tracy K. Smith. Richly illustrated, this publication includes plates of each drawing, as well as intimate photographs of the Walker at work taken by her partner, artist and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos.

Walker’s provocative use of silhouetted figures to portray slavery-era violence was introduced to the public by an exhibition at The Drawing Center in 1994 and she was honored at the museum’s last year gala.

#DrawingBooks #KaraWalker

Images: “The Ecstasy of St. Kara”. Photos by Ari Marcopoulos.

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## Tags

karawalker, drawingbooks

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