Curator and writer Daniel Fuller reviews “Kara Walker: Back of Hand”

The following review was written by curator and writer Daniel Fuller. Kara Walker: Back of Hand is on view through March 25, 2023 at the Athenaeum in Athens, Georgia.

Kara Walker has described her family’s move from Stockton, California, to Atlanta in 1983 as a “seminal moment in the lives of African Americans where one becomes black.” Then, and now, Atlanta has many sides to it. Before the move, the family lived in a progressive, multicultural community in Stockton, California. On arriving at their new home in Stone Mountain, they found the spiritual birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan was still active with rallies. Not far away was Black Power Atlanta. But out in the suburbs the Walkers lived in the literal shadows of the largest granite monolith in the world, permanent reminders of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis, symbols of white supremacy. The vestigial remains of the Lost Cause are never too far away.

In the absence of the collective myth of all of Atlanta’s virtues and equities, it’s here that Kara Walker makes her work. It’s no mistake that her art has rarely been exhibited here in Georgia (this being her first solo show), with most museums choosing not to be entertained at their own expense. This is what makes the exhibition, Back of Hand, at the Athenaeum in Athens all the more special. The exhibition focuses on works on paper, primarily watercolors or washy Sumi ink pieces that are sometimes ripped apart and collaged. Extraordinarily expressive, the paintings are more ominous evocations of the illustrations I find in my children’s books of fairy tales. Enough so that they almost feel familiar. The paintings are repeatedly hovering between wrath and faith, between dreams and nightmares, between reclaiming a childhood lost and the aggression of adults. A darkness hangs over everything. These are conversations typically held deep in the shadows.

In First Effort, 2022, we see a figure, perhaps a stand-in for the artist, lying flat, eyes and mouth open wide, buried in a shallow grave. She attempts to comfort herself, and calm her anxieties, with her arms crossed across her chest. Her large, almost perfectly rounded afro occupies a significant space in the small tunnel. She is swaddled in a nightdress that plumes from her abdomen, climbing up and out of the soil, creating a lifeline of oxygen. On the surface stand two figures, one white, one entirely represented in black, both wearing ruffled colonial attire. They are separated by a long night. On the surface, they are bathed in darkness. Below ground, she is bound by a tender, phosphorus light. To make sure she existed, she had to dig deep to build an escape hatch where she could vanish into herself. She was far from here, even before she was far from here. This is a painting of the art of disappearance—self-preservation.

A cut and pasted Black body twists and contorted itself to make way for a piece of text that rumbles towards it like an unleashed wave. In its attempt to accommodate the body gets overpowered, its fingers get painted over, becoming the white of the background, separating from itself. In the work The Ballad of How We Got Here, 2021 Walker is painting this hand-written text as though she is speaking in a great hurry, expunging the frontiers of her clamorous thoughts and memories. These are scribbles of sound and mind. The outpouring of emotions, ideas, and reactions feels torrential. It’s all crescendos, an odyssey of pure joy and fear, with no opportunities to steady the heartbeat. This work echoes throughout the space.

I’m fixated on the title Back of Hand, returning very much to the start, and its dual meanings. Of course, it could be applied to knowing something/someplace so wholly and intimately that it goes beyond typical comprehension. But to flip that, the title could imply contempt and repeated rejection. To be rejected early and often. That could be what Walker understands on the deepest level about a place that failed her when she needed it most. After a career of holding up a mirror to invite Americans to reckon with their history, this exhibition feels like the mirror has turned around. The memories she grapples with here are her own.