Kara Walker: White Shadows in Blackface

One of the most celebrated artists of our time, Kara Walker has spent the past three decades creating provocative, confrontational, critical and highly imaginative depictions of African Americans and whites in an effort to expose the horrors of our country’s collective past. Kara Walker: White Shadows in Blackface explores the work of this groundbreaking artist through the lens of several historical popular cultural traditions. Inside this clothbound book, you’ll find essays from leading art historian Robert Hobbs, which offer an in-depth analysis on the many ways that anti-Black conventions like blackface Americana, Harlequin Romance novels, Stone Mountain’s racist tourist attraction and the minstrel tradition have informed Walker’s challenging and thought-provoking body of work. These essays were originally written to accompany Walker’s 2002 exhibitions at the São Paolo Bienal and the Kunstverein Hannover and are published here in book form for the first time. Interspersed throughout