Black/White: Kara Walker’s ‘Work in Progress’

I really wanted to know more about this particular piece of art. Yet I have found that I have learned so much more about Kara Walker and her various works. Kara Walker is a contemporary artist from California. She explores race, sexuality, gender, violence and identity in her work. In her silhouettes, Walker’s black characters are cut out of black paper and the white characters live in a white space of reflection. Walker uses black cuts outs of figures to emphasize a more dramatic effect as a silhouette. The majority of her works were inspired by images found in her favorite history books. She uses these images as an example of how whites viewed black slaves in the antebellum south (Shaw).
Research into Kara Walker’s work leads me to believe the intent may be deeper than that. Walker’s work often caused an issue with other members of the art community. She was accused of not having a sensitive opinion on the topic of slavery. I am sure this can be due to the fact that she expresses herself through rough imagery which could easily be interpreted as disrespectful or offensive (Michele'Kieffer). Kara Walker addressed the issue in an interview by stating “The work is not about slavery so much as it conjures horrors of reconstruction and 20th-century Jim Crow-ism and the Tea Party.” Since her first exhibit Walker has become an international success, been labeled a genius and has won the MacArthur Fellowship.
Kara Walker’s work resonates in its featuring of past and present views on racism and slavery. Such as in her piece ‘Work in Progress’ she features a housemaid sweeping away an unshackled female figure in tattered rags. My initial thoughts on this piece were that the figure being swept away was the maid herself. It would seem she were trying to sweep her past out of the door with the goal in mind being liberation.