Lot Essay
“I’m fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There’s something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth. There’s this permeable membrane between experience and terror and violence and its retelling and misinterpretations of its retelling. So the ‘missed-mark’ quality is interesting because that’s as close as I feel I can get as an artist. I don’t think that my work is very moralistic – at least,
I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonizing tendency and I don’t think visual work operates like that.” – Kara Walker