Culture Vulture/Photo Diary: Kara Walker at SF MOMA and public art all over town

While my sister Barbara was visiting from Denver, we made an expedition to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) to check out the new Kara Walker show, installed in the street-level Roberts Family Gallery with free admission for everyone.

One of the country’s foremost visual artists, Walker gained her first major recognition in 1994 with "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart," a giant mural of black cut-paper silhouettes showing how enslaved African Americans were depicted during Antebellum South. At 28, she became the second youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant. Her other best-known creation was “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant,” a gigantic 35-foot-high sculpture of a female sphinx formed from 80 tons of white sugar.

You may have noticed that Walker likes long poetic titles. Her most recent work, “Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) / A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. / Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners / Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious / by Kara E-Walker,” explores robot technology.

The eight larger-than-life figures each have their own characters, names, backstories, and stuttery gestures.

The Whisperer (above) tells secrets to her doll; Harpy (below) emits music from strings in her torso.

Six of these stand on a platform of volcanic obsidian, a stone that gemologists consider to have healing properties. But it also has the eerie sense of a graveyard.

They are overseen by Fortuna, who rules from her own perch, motion-activated to spew gnomic messages.

Like all of Walker’s work, the show is witty, scary, and enraged all at once. She draws a line from this country’s history of slavery to Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge technology while conjuring the deathless torments of poverty, mental illness, drug addiction, and social injustice that can be readily witnessed on the streets of San Francisco.

SFMOMA’s lobby also displays “On Whales,” a video work by Wu Tsang, a Los Angeles-based artist (and another MacArthur fellow) whose films and installations have excited me since they were featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Speaking of free art, all over San Francisco gorgeous community artwork shows up in the form of murals and brightly painted houses.

My sister and I made a pilgrimage to Balmy Alley in the Mission, renowned for its ever-changing gallery of public art.

But really, you don’t have to go very far to encounter fantastic creations, not infrequently created as monuments to dearly departed locals.

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