Before I set out to meet Kara Walker at her studio in Brooklyn, she texts me a warning. “I may be a little hungover, I guess.” Her honesty, even on a small matter like this, is affecting. It makes you want to be candid too. “I’m jetlagged,” I text back. “I’m sure we’ll even out.”
Next month, Walker will become the fifth artist to take on the Hyundai commission at Tate Modern – creating a large, site-specific work in the vast Turbine Hall that’s bound to get people chattering about black art, continuing the success of such grand London exhibitions as Soul of a Nation, about the black power era in the US, and Get Up, Stand Up Now, which celebrated black British culture over the past 50 years.
Walker’s work immediately calls into question what black art could and should be, and whether it should even be categorised in such a way. Her work is about power, pain and pleasure, often told through the framework of black characters caught in subservient, perverse relationships and existences in the antebellum, or pre-civil war, American south. Born in 1969 in Stockton, California, Walker plunged into notoriety in the 1990s after studying at Rhode Island School of Design. Viewed as a whipsmart upstart, she made controversial cut-paper silhouettes of black figures that arguably played into racist caricatures – and won her the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” award in 1997.
But her craft, almost always monochrome, extends to etching, sketching and even sugarwork. She is now perhaps best known for A Subtlety, the completely unsubtle, giant, curvaceous sugar sphinx she constructed in 2014 at a disused sugar factory in Brooklyn, which drew such visitors as Beyoncé and Jay Z. The most consistent aspect of her work is its ability to latch on to you and unsettle you. The pouted lips of a black woman may be slightly engorged, the head of a baby rolling its eyes back might be slipping out of a vagina, a slave may be poised to chop off an arm. They’re like the unwanted, distressing thoughts that burrow into your head at night-time.
When Walker greets me at the door of her huge, industrial studio, she is warm and accommodating. I’m immediately confronted by one of her biggest works, the towering Katastwóf Karavan. A beast of a thing, created as part of the Prospect.4 triennial in New Orleans, it once sat on the banks of the Mississippi and depicts a particularly ominous scene of dancing, marching figures draped in vegetation. Next to the Karavan, Walker is petite, wearing a slick of iridescent blue eyeliner. Her trousers match her eyes – blue and tight. Her afro, speckled with silver, is tied into small, tight crops of curls.
We sit in the small outside garden, our interview soundtracked by the faint rustling of papery-leaved trees and the unsettling whine of New York’s emergency services. She speaks with deep pauses, and her voice sometimes fades into the air, letting you fill in the gaps of thoughts that aren’t always fully formed. Her laugh is unexpectedly huge and enticing.
“The Turbine Hall is like a grand prize,” says Walker. “You’ve been offered this gargantuan space and it’s all yours. It’s irresistible.” Walker learned she would be taking over this 85ft tall hall last year. The first black woman to do so, she will be walking in the footsteps of such artists as Ai Weiwei, who filled the hall with porcelain sunflower seeds in 2008, and Carsten Holler, whose spiralling slides scared critics in 2006.
For all her enthusiasm, Walker is wary of art galleries because she is “innately resistant” to the idea that she’s making art – although she admits: “I don’t know exactly what else it is.” Although she’s not allowed to reveal a huge amount about what her commission will look like, she does say: “I’m always kind of following some similar threads, even when I don’t mean to.”
Bolanle Tajudeen – a curator and the founder of Black Blossoms, which showcases black women artists – will be holding Art in the Age of Black Girl Magic workshops at Tate, which will involve going to see Walker’s commission. “I can tell you one thing,” she says. “It has water. There’s something subversive about having water included in your work as a black artist, because you’re obviously dealing with issues around the transatlantic slave trade.” But the water can speak to today’s crises as well. “You’re also dealing with issues of black migrants trying to cross borders.”
When pressed, Walker suggests her new work will “weave the intersections of the common themes” between black Americans and black Britons. Referencing the Windrush scandal, Walker admits that, until recently, her understanding of the experiences of black people in the UK was limited.
“From my perspective, it always seemed a fairly advanced place to be,” she says. “To be black and British and get a good education and have a good vocabulary and not have this legacy of systemic violence and educational and economic oppression. But I’m speaking of a fantasy version, because [in the US] things are so extreme.” However, as Walker seems to be slowly realising, black British people do have their own extreme legacy of slavery – played out in generational trauma, police brutality and overt everyday racism.
Britain’s colonial connections to the slave trade are reflected in the very name of the building housing Walker’s work. Henry Tate, part owner of the sugar company Tate & Lyle, funded and provided paintings for the first Tate gallery at the end of the 19th century. In August, Tate released a statement about this on its website: “While it is important to emphasise that Henry Tate was not a slave-owner or slave-trader, it is […] not possible to separate the Tate galleries from the history of colonial slavery from which in part they derive their existence.”
With a throaty laugh, Walker tells me she is aware of this history, telling me a story about a former Tate director visiting her sugar sphinx. Indicating the work, Walker said: “Oh, I’ve got a piece for your Turbine Hall!” She adopts a snooty British accent to mimic his response: “We only commission original projects.”
A Subtlety didn’t just lead to this new commission, though – it changed Walker’s life in ways she is still grappling with. She calls the sphinx, despite its size, her “baby”, something she wanted to look after. “When it was up, because it was such an unusual thing for me to have done, I wanted to be there with it. I wanted to be able to carry it around, drive it down the street, or not deal with its really uncomfortable reality.” Everyone wanted a bit of it: a selfie and a chance to offload their thoughts about it in her direction. “There was one guy who was a security guard and he had two books he wanted to write based on it.”
Some 130,000 people walked through the doors of the old sugar factory to gape at the sphinx, with her bosom and exposed genitals – and Walker has started getting noticed in the street. She has presented Solange Knowles with an award, created the Toni Morrison memorial cover for the New Yorker and – alongside the Tate – has another big exhibition coming up in London, curated by US writer and critic Hilton Als.
“I feel I have way more notoriety,” she says, looking up at the sky. “It’s died down a little bit but we were going out to galleries the other day and I was like, ‘Oh no, I don’t feel like a normal person.’ I don’t know what I feel. I don’t quite know what version of myself I’m supposed to bring.” She’s still figuring out how to be herself and own her achievements without “being an asshole”.
In the late 1990s, artist Betye Saar called Walker’s work “revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves”. Saar started a letter-writing campaign and Walker’s work was even removed from some spaces. In this day and age, she might have been what is known as “cancelled”. Walker, who turns 50 in November, says: “When I had that controversy in my late 20s, it was slower moving. There were some emails, faxes.” Today, she says, things are so different. “The whole social media thing is so vitriolic and heated and feels so violent. I mean cancelling somebody, it’s like murder. Cancelling should be cancelled.”
As for the subject of slavery and caricatures, Walker says: “I think what’s interesting – and maybe a little bit of the trap that I set for myself – is I didn’t want to be making work about slavery and I wasn’t. Then I said, ‘The only thing people want to hear from me is about slavery because, apparently, the only thing I am is black.’ So I said, ‘I’m gonna take everything I do about power and desire – and use the tropes of the slave narrative or the slave romance, like the antebellum romance, as the way to talk about these themes because this is something that clearly won’t go away. It will just keep being an unaddressed bugaboo in American culture.”
It may have been the hangover, but there is an air of melancholy to some of Walker’s answers to my questions. When I ask what the last thing was to make her really happy, she says: “Made me really happy? I keep being really sad.” But then she laughs and tells me about being off the beaten track in Greece earlier this summer, and finding herself at a children’s play park in a tiny village, where she came across a ride made out of four plastic swans.
“That ride and everything about that little theme park was so sincere and so rinky-dink and just on the edge of depression,” she says, smiling again. “I revere that edge.” Then she seems to remember my question and spells out her philosophy: “Toe the line, get on the swan ride, look at the blinky lights and be happy.”
Kara Walker’s Turbine Hall Commission is at Tate Modern, London, 2 October to 5 April. From Black and White to Living Colour: The Collected Motion Pictures and Accompanying Documents of Kara E Walker, Artist, is at Spruth Magers, London, 4 October to 21 December.