Kara Walker Domino: My Experience
This past Sunday I went to the Kara Walker art installation "A Subtlety" at the old Domino Sugar Refinery. The installation is only open this weekend before it closes permanently. The space will then be prepared for destruction. The factory that has stood here for over a century will be torn down in order to construct high-rise condominiums in its place.
I could talk about this installation for hours. It moved me in incredibly profound ways. I am so so grateful that I brought my real camera to shoot with instead of just my iPhone. It lent an air of seriousness to the photos I was taking. I was documenting this incredible art, and it felt amazing to be capturing it in the best way I knew how. It made me feel like less of a white-person gawker tourist and more like a feminist artist and documenter.
The entire experience was incredibly powerful; in every sense of the word. When I first walked in to the gutted, expansive, industrial space, there was an overwhelmingly sweet and sticky scent. Similar to molasses, but subtly more complex. There was a haunting musty undercurrent, similar to antique books, or old furniture shops. It was not at all unpleasant, although at times it felt like there was a lingering threat of acridity that we were somehow balancing on the edge of. I had never experienced the smell of time passing in such a sweet and heavy manor. It truly set the tone for the entire experience.
Throughout the room there were resin and sugar sculptures depicting the field labor and the slave laborers who tended the sugar fields. Many of them were just babies; little children carrying these massive baskets to gather the crop.
This broken piece, battered from the hot sun, was a heart-wrenching, in-real-time correlation to the brutal manual labor that enslaved persons bore in order to bring the product we know as sugar to fruition.
The space itself was also incredible; the walls steeped in more than a century of refinery by-product, the floor viscid with residue, the crackling sound of people walking through the refinery struggling to lift their their shoes off the sticky concrete.
And there she was. The featured piece. She is incredible. A 'sphynx-turned-mammy'. She is the reason we are all here. Not just the tourists, or the art lovers, but she is the creator -- she gives birth to new laborers and silently watches over the flock. She sits such a telling pose. From the front she is a watcher, perhaps a guardian to the little children who are laboring in front of her.
One of the most powerful moments for me was a passerby comment from two women walking behind me about the condensation between her breasts. The heat and humidity of the building had caused a dripping discoloration in the creviced area. Upon closer look, it was boob sweat. And I thought to myself -- I know boob sweat, she knows boob sweat, those women behind me know boob sweat -- it was this incredibly moving feminist revelation for me. I hadn't ever really thought that feeling would be a tie that binds, a female experience that transcends time, and place, and race, and culture -- a thing that happens to us.
As I moved around to the back of the sculpture, I became even more heavy with emotion. Seeing her splayed out in the way she was was wildly painful. Her backside reminds us that women's bodies are not their own, but just another tool to be used by those in power. Kara Walker does such an incredible job of expressing the oversexualization of black women and reminding us that slave women were there to be mounted and impregnated just as much as anything else.
I have a lot to say, but I'm not sure that it would come out right here. Honestly I'm not sure it would come out right anywhere -- I don't know if the words exist to adequately explain the anger, fear, heart-ache, guilt, passion, and desire that I have after seeing the installation. I'm not sure if truly explaining my feelings is even that important, or if it's just enough to know those feelings inside my heart. This was my experience with her -- and for that I'm truly grateful.
Go see more in person art. It's important. Seeing the brush strokes, and the colors, and the textures is so much more vibrant in person. You really get the sense of -- hey, that was a real life human being that created that.
Seek out the work done by the types of artists that you admire.
Learn about the artist and the piece so that you can fully interact with the work as intended. If you don't understand why the artist is doing the work, you're not going to be able to fully appreciate it.
Go into it with an open mind. This is someone trying to tell you a story that maybe only they are able to tell. It might not be told in the way you are accustomed to -- but I promise that if you allow yourself to have the story told to you in the way the artist intended, you will become a better person. You will find it easier to tell your own story, and easier to understand stories told by others. By pushing yourself far out of your comfort zone and seeking out new and different things, your creativity will blossom in ways you've never imagined.
Additional Reading:
The Audacity of No Chill - Gawker
We Are Here - Ebony
Debunking the Myths - HuffPo