Groundbreaking artist Kara Walker will be creating a site-specific commission for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Roberts Family Gallery, scheduled for debut in July 2024, the institution announced Tuesday, May 22.
On view free to the public and visible from Howard Street, the installation is to be the first work of art created specifically for the gallery, which opened on the museum’s ground floor in 2016 after a multi-year expansion project at SFMOMA. It will replace the massive 1940 fresco mural “Pan American Unity” by Diego Rivera currently in the gallery, on loan from City College of San Francisco while a new home is built for it.
“Kara Walker is this country’s most important living artist,” said SFMOMA DirectorChristopher Bedford. “She has been forcing us for 30 years to reckon with the very basis of this country: its organizing principles, the continuing legacy of racism, race-based violence and all of its ramifications in terms of economic power. To imagine her taking on those subjects again in the context of an American museum in San Francisco in a free public space is, for me, a dream come true.”
The title and exact nature of Walker’s project are still being developed, said Eungie Joo, SFMOMA’s curator of contemporary art. But Joo confirmed that the installation will likely involve sculpture and themes of memorialization, as well as explore how museums have displayed and visualized history through devices like dioramas and monuments.
“She’s also thinking about what we’ve gone through as a society in the last 10 years leading up to the pandemic and how a kind of crisis point was hit,” said Joo. “But it’s also (about) all the trauma that we experienced that we have not put anywhere. This will factor into this installation.”
Joo said that Walker has shared a sampling of her research for the project with her. These locally specific materials include pictures of the 1980s San Francisco performance art group the Survival Research Laboratories, as well as images from the“orange sky day” in September 2020and a homeless encampment outside San Francisco Civic Center.
Walker, 53, was born in Stockton to Larry Walker, a painter and chair of the visual arts department at the University of the Pacific, and Gwendolyn Walker, an administrative assistant. She lived there until the family moved to Stone Mountain, Ga., in the early 1980s when Walker was 13 years old.
Walker, who is now based in New York City, has spoken in the past about how moving from the multicultural West Coast to a part of the American South where Ku Klux Klan rallies were held was a culture shock for her as a young Black woman. That experience has been an influence on her work, which often addresses issues of race, gender and violence and how these themes have been depicted in American culture.
“Growing up as a young person in Northern California had a big influence on her,” said Joo, who has written about and worked with Walker as a curator and scholar for the last 25 years, beginning with writing about the artist’s relationship to visual culture and race when she was a graduate student.
“Her father was an artist, she grew up among the international art scene and had exposure to a very different world than she would grow up in as a teenager. She really considers the Bay Area her home, so this becomes a kind of homecoming.”
Walker’s use of black cut-paper silhouettes has become one of her most noted mediums, often using the delicate artform to tackle gruesome images of enslavement in the Antebellum South. Walker was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1997 at age 28, becoming the program’s second-youngest recipient.
Among Walker’s most well-known installations are “Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On)” from 2000, which referenced the Civil War-set film “Gone With the Wind” and featured her silhouetted characters backlit by colored light projections; and 2014’s “A Subtlety,” or the “Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant,” which consisted of a monumental female sphinx figure (75 feet long by 35 feet high) with the head of a stereotypical Black “mammy” figure surrounded by 15 life-size male figures modeled after racist figurines installed at the abandoned Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn.
In 1997, the artist presented a show of drawings, watercolors and two black-paper silhouette installations at SFMOMA titled “Kara Walker: Upon My Many Masters — An Outline” as part of the museum’s New Work series. The exhibition was Walker’s first solo museum exhibition on the West Coast.
SFMOMA awarded Walker its Contemporary Vision Award in 2018.
Reach Tony Bravo: tbravo@sfchronicle.com