Since she first came to the attention of the art world nearly ten years ago, Kara Walker has become one of the most important artists of her generation. Championed by the art world for her fearless embrace of challenging subject matter, Walker has created a body of work that looks unflinchingly at racial inequality in the United States. Inspired by the tragedy that beset the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, Walker has created a volume exploring the interconnectedness of the subject of the sea, race, and poverty by juxtaposing examples of her work and historical works from the 19th century.

Best known for her provocative black paper cutout silhouettes, Kara Walker confronts stereotypes, sex, violence and power relationships through Civil War-era parodies, narratives and a mastery of craft and installation. This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Williams College Museum of Art, presents a comprehensive overview of Walker’s work, including her first cut-paper wall installation, Gone, an Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994).

Kara Walker takes a medium that was extremely fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as part of the neoclassical revival, when the silhouetted images on ancient Greek and Roman vases were emulated on such goods as Wedgwood ware. Pictures From Another Time is the first major publication on the work of this extraordinary artist. It includes nearly 70 examples of her work, including her silhouettes, prints, drawings, projected installations and watercolors. Texts include an interview with the artist by curator Thelma Golden, Deputy Director of Programs at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Rebecca Peabody uses the work of contemporary American artist Kara Walker to investigate a range of popular storytelling traditions with roots in the 19th century and ramifications in the present. Focusing on a few key pieces that range from a wall-size installation to a reworked photocopy in an artist’s book, and from a theater curtain to a monumental sculpture, Peabody explores a significant yet neglected aspect of Walker’s production: her commitment to examining narrative depictions of race, gender, power and desire.

Examining Walker’s striking silhouettes, evocative gouache drawings and dynamic prints, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw analyzes the inspiration for and reception of four of Walker’s pieces: The End of Uncle Tom and The Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, John Brown, A Means to an End and Cut. She offers an overview of Walker’s life and career, and contextualizes her art within the history of African American visual culture and in relation to the work of contemporary artists including Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems and Michael Ray Charles.

Kara Walker’s oeuvre of black cut-paper silhouette wallworks creates vivid and shocking evocations, rooted in the most egregious stereotypes, of an antebellum world that comments on the system of slavery and its continuing legacy in the American consciousness. This volume includes a selection of her silhouette works–on both black and grey walls, and with light projections–and drawings.