Kara Walker explores themes of gender, race, sexuality, and violence through drawing, collage, film, sculpture, and performance. Her unflinching depictions of the history of slavery in the United States often incorporate artistic traditions from that time period, from caricatures associated with minstrelsy to silhouetted forms popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Walker resists euphemistic and reductionist understandings of the ongoing legacy of slavery with artworks like A Reduction, 2020, a towering four-panel piece in Glenstone’s collection that highlights the artist’s decades-long commitment to collaged silhouettes. She considers her work an exploration of her interiority and position in the world: “Everything that I do starts with an effort in recalling who I am. Crawling through the clutter of who I am supposed to be; who somebody else thinks I am.”

–From the Glenstone Field Guide