Kara Walker :: a notebook of words and ideas and images–very personal writings

06 Jun 2016

the shame of the South and the shame of the South’s past; its legacy and its contemporary troubles. Race issues are always at the heart of these matters. And then I got interested in the ways that I almost wanted to aim to please … and fulfill these kinds of desires, these assumptions and associations with blackness. I became very submissive and subservient to myths about blackness, the [kind of] blackness that’s exotic, animalistic, or savage; or noble and strong and forceful–worth putting on display, something grander than grand.

And so I started a couple of years ago keeping a notebook of words and ideas and images, and just about anything that I could to process what blackness was and is all about for me–very personal writings, along with just clippings, nothing that was art, just a way of getting at ideas.

— Kara Walker, 1999.