Black Box: Kara Walker & Hank Willis Thomas
Ohio, Baltimore, 06/28/2017 - 03/18/2018
10 Art Museum Drive
Salvation by Kara Walker, one of the most significant works in the
BMA’s contemporary collection, and And I Can’t Run by Hank Willis
Thomas, a recent promised gift to the Museum, start a critical conversation
in the Black Box Gallery on slavery’s legacy.
Walker’s Salvation, 2000, is a complex consideration of African
American and female identity within the tragic history of American slavery.
The central silhouetted female figure is characteristic of Walker’s work, which
collides racial stereotypes and violent scenes with the genteel tradition of
cut paper silhouettes. In this example, the figure gasps, perhaps drowning, in
a swamp. The work’s title Salvation could suggest the woman has taken to the
water to escape her enslavement. A grim possibility is that a death by
drowning offers the only salvation from the horrors she has experienced. The
foreboding and haunting scene is heightened through dim lighting and shadowy
layers of imagery generated by an overhead projector.
Light is also critical to understanding the imagery of Hank Willis Thomas’s
And I Can’t Run, 2013. Initially appearing as an almost illegible
group of white-on-white forms on a rectangular field, a chilling photographic
image of a black man shackled before aggressive white onlookers emerges once
the work is photographed on a cell phone using a flash.
Where Walker returns to the centuries-old silhouette craft to examine the
legacy of slavery in American, Thomas brings contemporary technology to the
subject. Both artists, however, find contrasts of light and dark, white and
black, and obscurity and revelation to be powerful metaphors for horrific
violence and racial inequality in the United States.