The Easel

8th October 2019

Kara Walker debuts monumental fountain in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall

Leonidas Kalai | Art Critique | 1st October 2019

Kara Walker is having a moment in London. There is a survey of her acclaimed films that deal with slavery in America’s Antebellum South. A newly commissioned sculpture looks, at first glance, like British Empire bombast. Closer inspection shows it to contain figures that speak to Britain’s colonial past – “playful and inviting, yet brutal in its core.  A video (4 min) is here.

1st October 2019

With a brass band blaring, artist Kehinde Wiley goes off to war with Confederate statues

Phillip Kennicott | The Washington Post | 28th September 2019

Proposals to remove Richmond’s Confederacy-era statues caused a huge controversy.  Virginia’s Museum of Fine Art has a nice response – a “massive” statue of an African American man. Temporarily in New York’s Times Square, the figure wears dreadlocks and street wear and strikes a faux-heroic pose atop a horse. In December it will be installed in Richmond, a “profoundly subversive response to the city’s Civil War dilemma.”

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