Kara Walker: Back of Hand

A hand, like a sheet of paper, suggests a verso and a recto, a past and a future intimately connected in their reference to one another. Kara Walker: Back of Hand presents works on paper by the American artist Kara Walker that deal directly in the contradictions of misremembered histories, most pointedly in her career-long representation of the horrors beneath the antebellum South’s genteel facades.

The title of the exhibition suggests a rebuff (a slap in the face), but also a familiarity (knowing something like the back of your hand ). This paradox may relate to Walker’s own relationship to the South, having grown up outside of Atlanta in the shadow of Stone Mountain, a monument to the confederacy. A landscape can hold both a personal knowledge and a deeper wound infected with a collective history of violence. Here, Walker presents a more ambivalent reading: that which hurts you is often the very instrument you know most intimately.

The Poetry Foundation’s presentation of Kara Walker: Back of Hand, on view in the gallery through May 18, 2024, appropriately foregrounds Walker’s long-term engagement with language and text. The exhibition features 2015 Book, a series of eleven typewritten pages with ink and watercolor illustrations, and two large-scale drawings, The Ballad of How We Got Here and Feast of Famine. Completed in 2021, this will be the first time these works are shown in Chicago. The mural-like compositions present a disorienting tableau of inked collaged forms surrounded by swirling lines of handwritten text. Words and sentence fragments jump out from the deluge, appearing like excerpts from a larger, ongoing conversation around power and history. In The Ballad of How We Got Here and Feast of Famine, these torrential narratives unfold as visual poems, yielding a multiplicity of parallel readings.

This folio reproduces some of the drawings in Back of Hand that were in the original exhibition at the Athenaeum in Athens, Georgia. In the drawings presented here, Walker mingles washes of watercolor, gouache, ink, and graphite to create a series that calls forth a past at once mythological and real, ancient and contemporary. Poets Samiya Bashir, Krista Franklin, and Ruth Ellen Kocher respond to the images to foreground their own lyrical investigations of struggle and loss.

Walker’s influences are varied and vast, from the political sketches of Francisco Goya, to the caricatures of Honoré Daumier, to medieval books of hours. Blue, from Walker’s extensive Book of Hours series, depicts a nude figure hovering over a blue shadow, their fingers tenderly touching, a pool of ink at her feet. “I should/know, for months swallowed/in the bruise of myself/reaching to hold my hand,” writes Franklin. In Wokey Wokey a beast crouches atop a dreaming woman, her mouth agape. The work recalls Henry Fuseli’s famous 1781 painting The Nightmare. In Walker’s version, two sphinx-like silhouettes frame the central action, their mouths open as if imploring the woman to wake from her troubled slumber, a nightmare that can be seen to be both personal and, in light of Walker’s background, profoundly American.