Anyone who bristles at the imaginary scenes of sexual violence in a Tyler the Creator rhyme is certainly not prepared for Kara Walker’s visual narratives of horror. Walker has become known for her illustrations of the not so imaginary sexual and physical crimes of the antebellum south. Her large black paper silhouettes of rapes and lynchings have decorated the walls of many a prestigious museum, from New York to Paris. In Dust Jackets For the Niggerati- And supporting Dissertations, Drawings Submitted Ruefully by Kara E. Walker, now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, Walker continues to explore the grotesque situations of slavery, racism, sexuality, violence and gender in America. But a few of the subjects have been removed from the south into the space of the northern cities.

What struck me as the most interesting part of the exhibit, a collection of about 40 graphite drawings and some hand printed texts, was the theme of the female artist. In “Billie Holiday” and “Nina Simone”, Walker shines a light on the abuse and insecurities of the most talented women who are known best for their creative contributions to the struggle of black folk in the mid-twentieth century. One of the drawings, “Excape”, sent me on a Dana-esqe (protagonist of sci-fi novel Kindred) trip into the past as I thought about the subject- a runaway slave girl who tightly clutches a guitar as she wades in the water- and the real life characters, women who scarcely escaped the death of slavery with their life and talents in tow.

In fact Kara Walker’s work maybe the visual contemporary to Octavia Butler’s Kindred because she plays so much with time and space with her images. “Muckracking Prophet from the 21^st Century Fortells Coming Doom” is a perfect example of this point. In the piece, a woman in stilettos dances on an auction block to an audience of slaves and overseers and in the backdrop a servant girl is distracted by her iPhone. Although Walker’s subjects occupy a certain era, she artfully blurs the line between past and present and makes the viewer focus on how contemporary the issues are.