Kara Walker: Back of Hand
The Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL
February 15 – May 18, 2024
Kara Walker, BOH, 2021.
The Poetry Foundation presents Kara Walker: Back of Hand, on view February 15 through May 18, 2024. The exhibition foregrounds Walker’s long-term engagement with language and text, featuring 2015 Book, a series of 11 typewritten pages with ink and watercolor illustrations, and two large-scale drawings, The Ballad of How We Got Here and Feast of Famine. Completed in 2021, Back of Hand at The Poetry Foundation will be the first time these large-scale drawings are shown in Chicago.
The mural-like compositions present a disorienting tableau of inked collaged forms surrounded by swirling forms of handwritten text. Words and sentence fragments jump out from the deluge, appearing like excerpts from a larger, ongoing conversation around power and history. In The Ballad of How We Got Here and Feast of Famine, these torrential narratives unfold as visual poems, yielding a multiplicity of parallel readings.
New York-based artist Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Her work can be found in museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome; and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt.
This exhibition comes to the Poetry Foundation from the Athenaeum, part of University of Georgia’s (UGA) Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens, Georgia. The exhibition is curated by Katie Geha and organized by Katherine Litwin and Fred Sasaki. To learn more, click here.