"The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does."
"There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist."
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More quotes by Kara Walker
"Silhouettes are reductions, and racial stereotypes are also reductions of actual human beings."
"If you're a Black artist, you could paint a wall of smiley faces, and someone will still ask you, 'Why are you so angry?'"
"I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful"
"A lot of my work has been about the unexpected—that kind of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time. That kind of dilemma—that push and pull—is the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make."
"Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about."