My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, a Kara Walker retrospective, presents her better known work (narrative scenes made with cut black paper on a white background) along with collages, ink drawings, paintings, and sketches.

The book begins with Walker’s “Visual Essay,” a series of images from her personal collection: a cardboard shipping box for Aunt Jemima syrup, the cover of a Mandingo-like paperback, newspaper clippings, and collages of Rosa Parks over a chipper-looking black woman at a car rental counter. It’s interesting to see what images spark her need to make work.

Throughout the book we see finished works alongside sketches. Walker’s images are typically very clean and mechanical; My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love shows the gears behind the work.

Walker has always challenged the optimism of tropes and sayings like “black is beautiful,” presenting instead what she calls a “continuity of conflict.” After receiving the MacArthur Foundation grant in 1997, she received droves of negative, heated letters - mostly from African Americans and women who were upset by her sometimes self-depricating interpretations of race and gender. They were frustrated that she didn’t buy into their pro-active aesthetics.

But her critics may have judged her too quickly and, inadvertently, proven her point. In the forward, Walker remarks, “The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.”

After ten years, Walker has remained influential and controversial. My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love is the most solid catalogue of her career.

- Halle Butler

Kara Walker: My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
Philippe Vergne
Hardcover, 432 pages
$49.95, Walker Art Center