Exhibitions
KARA WALKER: CUT TO THE QUICK
Frist Art Museum / 919 Broadway July 23, 2021 - October 10, 2021
Kara Walker
The Frist Art Museum presents Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, an exhibition that offers a broad overview of the artist’s career and explores racial and gender exploitation, abuse, and inequity. Co-organized by Frist Art Museum executive director and CEO Dr. Susan H. Edwards and Nashville-based poet Ciona Rouse, Cut to the Quick will be on view in the Frist’s Upper-Level Galleries from July 23 through October 10, 2021.
A leading artist of her generation, Kara Walker (b. 1969) works in a diverse range of media, including prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, film, and the large-scale silhouette cutouts for which she is perhaps most recognized. Her powerful and provocative images employ contradictions to critique the painful legacies of slavery, sexism, violence, imperialism, and other power structures, including those in the history and hierarchies of art and contemporary culture. Through more than 80 works created between 1994 and 2019 from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation—premier collectors of works on paper in the United States—Cut to the Quick simultaneously demonstrates Walker’s fluency in medium and power in message.
“Her hard-hitting, unorthodox depictions of taboo subjects expose the raw flesh of generational wounds that have never healed,” writes Dr. Edwards in an introduction to the exhibition. “Intentionally unsentimental and ambiguous, the works can be disturbing yet also humorous, always exploring the irreconcilable inconsistencies that mirror the human condition.”
Image: Kara Walker (American, b. 1969). African/American, edition 22/40, 1998. Linocut, 44 x 62 in. Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, 1998.53. © Kara Walker
