KARA WALKER (1969 - ) Bureau of Refugees: Black girl beaten to death by Washington and Greene McKinney.
Cut paper on paper, 2007. 486x632 mm; 19 1/8x24 7/8 inches. Signed on the verso.
Provenance: Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; private collection, with the gallery labels on the frame back.
Walker's Bureau of Refugees series includes her signature cut paper silhouettes, interspersed with collaged elements and handpainted text to illustrate "The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands - Records, 'Miscellaneous Papers' National Archives M809 Roll 23" and its list of "Riots and Outrages"--violent acts against African-Americans in the early days of Reconstruction in Montgomery, AL.
The Freedmen's Bureau was formed to aid former slaves in adjusting to life as free citizens. Yet the atrocities inflicted upon freed slaves in the South between the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the official end of Reconstruction in 1877 were numerous, and lists were devoted to naming the crimes, and--where applicable--the names and race of each person involved in the crime. These recorded crimes are what Walker depicts, utilizing multiple mediums to create a historical and artistic representation: "The works in Bureau of Refugees' differ structurally from other narrative works of mine because the images sit like non-sequiturs and play with repetition and isolation. Instead of setting out to explode assumptions about race and gender using the rearguard aesthetic of cut paper silhouette and figuration, and pre-modern tropes of narrative, sentimentality, craft and trickery, this show came about by trying to recreate the objectivity of language and painting."
