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Kara Walker, in Context
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Kara Walker, in Context
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Magazine Article
Kara Walker, in Context
2023
Overview
The Long Hot Black Road to Freedom, a Double Dixie Two-Step (2005-08) is a strong representative of the artwork for which Kara Walker first became known. It remains one of her signature mediums: the black-and-white cutout. Like her other silhouette installations, this piece interrogates the audience, creating a psychologically interactive drama. Viewers are given the opportunity to become aware of and spend time experiencing their own uneasiness with stories that invoke race, violence, love, and lust without any of the familiar narrative preconditions they might expect. Yet, this piece also offers a unique opportunity to its viewers.Walker's imagery is often associated with the legacy of slavery in the United States and, indeed, Walker has used this legacy as a rich vein of material inspiration, drawing from archival sources, historical and contemporary reimaginings of history, and her own imagination. But just as the work has a slippery association with the signifiers of race, time, and place, so too does it evade a concrete and permanent location in the US. Owned by a private collection in Hong Kong, which also collects works from Europe, America, and across Asia, and loans its pieces out globally, this work has the potential to disrupt comfort zones, as well as initiate selfreflection and larger conversations worldwide. What histories of violence and enslavement might be called up by the works alongside this piece within the collection? What local meaning might be activated when The Long Hot Black Road to Freedom is loaned out and displayed elsewhere in the world? What might be said about the exportation Of US Specific imagery about slavery to other countries that are grappling with their own unique histories of oppression? This is, indeed, a piece that resonates uncomfortably, yet productively, far beyond the US.
