“I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.”
—Kara WalkerKara Walker’s Freedom: A Fable was created in 1997, the same year Walker became one of the youngest people to receive the MacArthur Genius grant. The work was initially produced as a Peter Norton Family Christmas Project, a program where artists were commissioned to create original, editioned works to be given as holiday gifts. Walker's creation takes form in a hand-held pop-up book, an intimate iteration of the monumental cut-paper silhouettes endowed with themes of social issues and black history, for which she is known. Walker’s chosen visual device, the silhouette, utilizes the traditional Victorian art form of cut-paper silhouettes to tell the story of a female slave disenchanted by the unfulfilled promises of equal opportunity after emancipation. By organizing Freedom: A Fable as a book, an object one is meant to hold and spend time with, Walker immerses her audience with the horrors of slavery and her protagonist’s inability to gain independence.
Auguste Edouart, Elizabeth Francis, standing to the left with a harp, 1843. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Glenn Tilley Morse Collection, Bequest of Glenn Tilley Morse, 1950, 50.602.573 In Freedom: A Fable, Walker illustrates and narrates the story of an enslaved woman and her sons’ journey from a plantation in the American South to the colony of Liberia during the Civil War era. Liberia, envisioned by both black and white Americans during the early 19th century as the “solution” to the problem of slavery, quickly becomes a lesson of disillusionment and oppression in Walker’s narrative. The protagonist and her sons board a ship with the hopes of reaching the African “New World,” their dreams are soon shattered by the boys’ deaths due to the boat’s poor conditions. Freedom: A Fable offers commentary on Eden, an imagined a tropical utopia where black people could one day be free.
Kara Walker is a New York based printmaker, painter, and installation artist, often recognized by her profound exploration of race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity. Walker, born 1969, can be described as a post-black artist, addressing racism and sexism through irreverent, and somewhat ironic methods. She often utilizes exaggerated, stereotypical architypes of African Americans in the Antebellum South, including the mammy caricature, highlighting the power dynamics that have persistently harmed and sexualized black women. Walker’s cut-paper silhouette images are bridges between the enslaved American folklore of the Pre-Civil War South and the identity and gender issues still relevant to modern African American women.
Artist Biography
Kara Walker
American • 1969
Kara Walker sugarcoats nothing. Her masterpiece public art commission, A Subtlety, 2014, was a 35-foot high racial confrontation of artifact, mythology and American history in the form of a sphinx packed from 80-tonnes of Domino white sugar crystals. Walker's practice first caught audiences with her haunting paper cutout silhouettes retelling the injustices of slavery and the foundations of American capitalist culture.
Walker's immense talent matched by her cunning commentary has made her one of the most important contemporary artists today, having enjoyed major exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York in addition to permanent placements within the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art Institute Chicago. Her auction market is strong for a mid-career artist, with works reaching more than $300,000.
27
Freedom: A Fable
1997
Laser-cut paper pop-up book, bound in brown leather (as issued).
9 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 3/4 in. (23.5 x 21 x 1.9 cm)
From the edition of 4000, published by The Peter Norton Family Christmas Project, New York.
Estimate
$2,000 - 3,000
Sold for $2,794
Editions & Works on Paper
New York Auction 12 February 2025
10
This lot is no longer available.
149
This lot is no longer available.
