When Africans first touched down on American soil, the majority were used for one reason. To be slaves on plantations throughout the United States of America. They would soon be known as African-Americans as time wore on and their time spent in the United States increased. A multitude of changes occurred over their time in this country from when they were slaves until modern day America. An Installation Artist by the name of Kara Walker has tried to document these changes in her artwork, which will be seen later on throughout the piece. Something unlike the images that you have seen to describe African-American culture through the years, her images contain a sense of brutally honest ethnically charged art that is famous worldwide. Kara Walker …show more content…
Some may also make you slightly queasy. In one interview, she said that she loves that queasy feeling, that it knows that it is putting her work on the edge and that it could be great. The picture above is pretty obvious, it is two African-Americans getting hung from a tree by two white men. The time period that this could fall in could be from anywhere from when the KKK was active in the 20th century or as far back as slavery. One thing that she does in this image that you rarely see an artist do is that she is very descriptive of the African-American’s facial expressions while they’re getting hung. Many artists shy away from painting something like this, but Kara Walker shows it in all of its entirety, a large reason as to why she is so well known. Every image of Walker’s that I have seen has been racially charged in some way, race and ethnicity obviously have played a big role in her life, as was stated in Quintance Morgan’s assessment of Kara Walker’s work in Art Monthly. She chose to document events in modern time and well before that to provide the world with the brutally honest truth, to get a real sense of what actually