African Boy Attendant Curio with Molasses and Brown Sugar was originally conceptualised as part of Kara Walker’s monumental installation A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby at The Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, New York in 2014. Reconfiguring themes of race, slavery, and industrial symbiosis with coloniality, the installation provided as many questions as solutions.
African Boy Attendant Curio with Molasses and Brown Sugar, like all the elements of the installation, was created from cast resign coated with sugar and molasses. As this device is employed, the figure of an African child stands as a sentinel across the sugar trade’s chronology, from colonialism into the present day.
In the first instance, Walker articulates the reality that black slaves in the Caribbean and the Antebellum South, including children, were reduced to the purpose they served. The figure’s very existence is enshrined in the dark molasses produced from its labour. The sugar that became more readily available as a result, was moulded into large edible sculptures to demonstrate the status of the wealthy. As such, Walker’s use of an edible material is a graphic reminder of how enslaved people were consumed by the industries they serviced. It is the same industries that are fortified in buildings such as The Domino Sugar Factory, which the artist confidently challenges while acknowledging their considerable might. Today, as sugar continues to be excessively consumed, it contributes to endemics of diabetes and obesity that disproportionately affect the poor.
“My work has always been a time machine looking backwards across decades and centuries to arrive at some understanding of my “place” in the contemporary moment.”
—Kara Walker
Kara Walker’s capacity to evoke a circle of exploitation and degradation in her work is uncanny. Continuing to create large scale installations, the artist exhibited Fons Americanus at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2019. This work mimicked neo-classical and baroque fountains, subverting monumental tributes to power, and mythicising the African diaspora instead.
The artist’s practice is grounded in our histories, using mediums and devices that intertwine with the past. For example, her most famous works use caricatured silhouettes made from black paper cut outs to depict troubling and depraved scenes of enslaved Africans at the hands of their white owners. This medium was popularised for story telling in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries when the transatlantic slave trade was at its zenith. As with the use of sugar sculptures, Walker appropriates artisanal practices, reinforcing themes that remain today despite our best efforts to leave them in the past.
