Sugarcoating Stereotypes
For my female identified artist I chose Kara Walker (an artist I never heard of prior to this assignment) and her work called “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 (2014).”
This particular work that Walker made is basically a sugar coated sculpture that takes on the presence and gigantic form of a sphinx with a few altercations here and there. One of the changes I noticed was the body of the sphinx was less animalistic and more sexualized, clearly displaying the boobs, butt, and vagina of a female crouched on all fours. Another change was the head of the sphinx was changed to the head of the black female stereotype of the Mammy.
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| Position of Kara Walker's "A Subtlety" sculpture, 2014. |
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| Kara Walker's "A Subtlety" (front-view), 2014. |
From my knowledge, a Mammy is supposed to be an African domestic servant/caretaker and even protector to the white slave owners/family. In terms of physicality, the stereotype was made for her to be seen as grotesque and overweight. Overall, the Mammy was originally created as a way to maintain white supremacy and justify slavery by painting blacks as defying the norms (in this case black women going against femininity). However, the sculpture that Walker makes, doesn’t desexualize her at all. In fact, the embracement of the sculpture’s sexualization is actually seen as a symbol of power that makes the entire piece iconic and unexpected.
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| Mammy Stereotype, 2018. |
Through this sculpture, Walker blurs people’s natural inclination to view the world through the lens of the male gaze as defined by Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema to be “a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking split between active/male and passive/female” (Mulvey 837). This piece is also related to Ways of Seeing by John Berger and his concept of “naked simply being without clothes, whereas nude is a form of art” (Berger 53). Not only does the passivity of the sculpture help the Mammy gain power, but it upsets expectations. It also raises the questions between naked and nude. On one hand, yes, the sculpture is naked as in totally bare. On the other hand, the sculpture is artistically created so people can see the work as an embodiment of racism within our history. As Berger also states, “She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her” (Berger 50). Walker wants to keep this intimate connection between her work and the past alive. The audience and critics definitely see the detailed thought process behind this masterpiece and the power she’s giving black and especially black females in and of themselves.
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| Kara Walker "A Subtlety" (rear-view), 2014. |
Walker explains her piece more in depth by describing “sugar subtlety” as a “sculpture made out sugar that was sculpted to portray royalty, and could be consumed by royalty, nobility, and clergy.” Her inspiration for the entire sugar theme including the smaller scale sculptures of little boys carrying baskets and bananas all made out of molasses, was because the space she used for the sculpture took place inside the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that was demolished shortly after Walker’s art show ended. She had originally found the vacant factory with its floor and walls covered all over with sugar and molasses.
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| Kara Walker Little Boy Figure Dripping In Molasses, 2014. |
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| Kara Walker Little Boy Figure Carrying Bananas, 2014. |
Later, she then researched more about sugar in order to better understand the building. The history of sugar went along the lines of sugar→ sugar cane→ grown in tropics→ harvested by slaves, unpaid workers, and children→ ENDS IN RUINS!
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| "A Subtlety" by Kara Walker, 2014. |
Kara Walker is known to create diverse works that focus primarily on histories having to deal with slavery, discrimination, and race. She is much well-known for her large paper cut-outs that bring the narratives of the pre-Civil War American South to life. Many of the characters and scenery she makes often represent stereotypes of the time as we can see from this sculpture.
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| Kara Walker paper cut-outs that got her discovered in the New York art scene, mid-1990s. |
All in all, I really enjoyed exploring artist Kara Walker and her “Marvelous Sugar Baby” sculpture and hope to see some of her works in person one day!
Works Cited:
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - Laura Mulvey
Ways of Seeing - John Berger
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Kara Walker’s Website link: http://www.karawalkerstudio.com/2014/
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