Kara Walker is one of the most successful and widely known contemporary African-American artists today--remarkable for her radical engagement with issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Walker is best known for her provocative installations, composed of cut-paper silhouettes depicting fantastic and grotesque scenes of the antebellum South. This thesis examines Walker's work in silhouettes, text, and video in order to establish the unifying logic that unites her media. Walker's use of racist stereotypes has incited vehement criticism, and the debate over the political meaning of her work has been worked and reworked in the voluminous literature on her artistic practice. This thesis focuses on how Walker's defense and explanation of her own work functions as a performative and political component of the art itself. Walker's construction and performance of an artistic identity is an integral and intentional part of her overall practice and a key component to the interpretation of her work.

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The purpose of my Thesis is to further develop an artistic practice that involves a thoughtful, drawn out engagement with culture, utilizing immediacy, temporality and improvisation through the formal manipulation of different mediums. My research focuses on these ideas as a continual thread that runs through my work of the past twenty years and gives conceptual unity to the range of stylistic experiments that have come with my growth as an artist. The end result is collage, painting, video and installation that utilizes both the literal and parabolical tearing, cutting and pasting of elements together as analogies within a defined field. The defined field being both the formal area of the work, as well as the conceptual representation of my individual consciousness as expressed through my process. Moving between abstraction and representation allows me to sample my thoughts and present them through a methodology that is consistent with the cognitive interplay of abstract and representative thought.

Br(others) Only conceptualizes the wall sculptures of Rashid Johnson as free-standing “altars” that play with different and sometimes divergent brands of black masculinity and classed homosociality. Primarily, I analyze three of Johnson’s sculptures from the late 2000s: I Who Have Nothing (2008); I’m Still in Love with You (2008); and Souls of Black Folk (2010). I argue that, by invoking the history of black renaissance men, gentlemen scholars, and entertainers, Johnson’s work plays with various kinds of black masculinity and homosociality that simultaneously straddle the past and future. By doing so, his art not only enacts a racialized temporality, but it also chips away at monolithic notions of black masculinity by fabricating contradictory amalgams of race, class, and gender. For my analysis of Johnson’s artworks, I utilize Cassandra Jackson’s Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body (2010) as the chief framework for conceptualizing the waxy coats of Johnson’s sculptures as wounded bodies in an effort to “flesh out” the vulnerability of black men. Theorizing the putrescent surfaces of Johnson’s sculptures as violable bodies allows me to consider the ruptures between seemingly impenetrable black masculinity and the always-present vulnerability of the black male body to violence. / text