Kara Walker: A Negress of Noteworthy Talent

A Negress of Noteworthy Talent documents a multimedia project developed by Kara Walker (born 1969) in Turin: her 2011 solo exhibition at the Fondazione Merz, a workshop for students from the Art Academy and University of Turin, an international conference on the politics and psychology of race stereotypes. The result is a defiantly unresolved exploration of the myth and memory of the African-American experience, an experience not fully collective or personal, but something uncomfortably in between, unfolding in a sinister and humorous shadowland of grotesque silhouettes and puppets. Walker’s Turin project further explores the drama of race that is as much a drama of the unconscious as it is about skin.