Through the Lens of Kara Walker’s Artwork: Exploring Race, Identity, and Intersectionality in Higher Education

Abstract

Kara Walker’s art, known for its stark depictions of race, history, and power dynamics, offers an invaluable entry point for discussing race in higher education. Integrating Walker’s work into the humanities classroom allows for critical engagement with historical and contemporary issues of race, ethnicity, and systemic oppression. Through her use of silhouettes and narratives that expose the brutal legacies of slavery, racism, and colonialism, Walker’s art challenges students to confront uncomfortable truths and foster deeper conversations about intersectionality. Discussing Walker’s art can lead to explorations of how race intersects with class, gender, sexuality, and disability, revealing the layered and compounded experiences of marginalized groups. Through the flipped classroom approach, students were introduced to Kara Walker’s work outside of class through assigned readings and materials. During class time, discussions were facilitated by students themselves, enhancing peer-to-peer learning. The session was led by a pupil responsible for elaborating on Walker’s work and guiding the discussion. In-class time was dedicated to small-group discussions where students critically engaged with the themes in Walker’s art. These groups provided space for more intimate, reflective conversations. After small-group discussions, insights were shared in a larger panel discussion format. This allowed students to synthesize ideas, compare perspectives, and engage with a wider range of interpretations of Walker’s art. By engaging with Walker’s work, students develop a more nuanced understanding of oppression and social justice, making her art a powerful tool for transformative education.

In one particularly evocative print from artist Kara Walker’s The Means to an End—A Shadow Drama in Five Acts, the silhouettes of a young girl being held by a man in a top hat stand as a stark, haunting commentary on the intimate yet violent relationships between slave and master, adult and child. This image, both visually simple in its black-and-white composition and deeply complex in its implications, invites viewers to confront the brutal realities of historical power dynamics. The print is one of five that make up Walker’s larger horizontal etching, first debuted in 1995. In the full scene, set against a swampland, the heads of escaping slaves barely emerge from the water, evoking a sense of desperation and the ever-present threat of capture. On the far left, a mother nurses her child, symbolizing both care and the inescapable generational trauma of slavery. These elements coalesce into a powerful tableau that compels viewers to reckon with the weight of history, while also reflecting on how art and visual culture continue to shape our understanding of race, power, and identity.

Like many of Walker’s works, The Means to an End spanned the museum walls with its large scale, immersing the viewer in its political and emotional intensity. However, in 1999, it was removed from an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts following protests by artists and collectors disturbed by its graphic depictions.

Walker’s silhouettes have also ignited significant debate within the Black artistic community, revealing a generational divide that situates her practice alongside a broader “post-black” movement. Artists such as Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell have openly criticized Walker’s reliance on stereotypical imagery and her representations of racial violence, arguing that they risk perpetuating the same harmful tropes they aim to dismantle.1 Meanwhile, Walker’s work shares important traits with other 1990s and early 2000s “post-black” artists, including Glenn Ligon and Michael Ray Charles, who each grapple with the legacy of racialized iconography yet do so in styles that blur the boundaries of tradition, satire, and political critique.2 This tension—between artists warning against re-stigmatization and artists exploring new modes of representation—embodies the complexity at the heart of Walker’s art. Understanding these debates and the scholarship on post-black art provides vital context for both her artistic strategies and the ways in which they may be received. In our classroom discussions, we foreground this controversy to demonstrate that Walker’s work emerges from an evolving discourse on race, identity, and the burdens of representation—one that extends beyond the artist herself and shapes the ways we teach, interpret, and ultimately learn from these potent visual narratives.

In our module “Culture and Critique” part of the Studium Individuale major at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Walker’s work occupies a central place in our syllabus. Walker’s arresting images are pivotal in our discussions on art and culture, as well as the imbedded concepts of race, history, and the politics of representation. Her work serves as a critical focal point for our diverse group of students—approximately 40 individuals hailing from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds and interests.

One particularly important aspect of our discussions is the physical and historical context in which they occur. Our current university campus is the former Scharnhorst Barracks, a site that was once part of the German Armed Forces infrastructure. This architectural and historical transformation—turning a military installation into a space for higher education—introduces a layer of complexity to the discussions surrounding Walker’s work. The historical legacy of the site, originally built for military purposes, evokes themes of power, control, authority, order, and militarism, which may resonate with the tensions embedded in Walker’s art. The juxtaposition of past and present in our classroom environment, as part of a site recontextualized for education and dialogue, invites students to reflect on the ways in which physical spaces can carry the weight of history. This is particularly relevant to Walker’s art, which interrogates how power structures—both institutional and historical—operate through the visual and physical spaces we inhabit. This context thus allows us to better contextualize our reflections about how institutions of power can be transformed into sites of critique, resistance, and education.

Walker’s art serves as a point of convergence for a range of perspectives. Through both historical and contemporary lenses, students explore how her work disrupts dominant narratives of race and power, forcing a confrontation with systems of oppression that have shaped, and continue to shape, our world. Central to our discussions of Walker’s work is art historian Darby English’s chapter “A New Context for Reconstruction: Some Crises of Landscape in Kara Walker’s Silhouette Installations”, from his book How to See a Work of Art in the Darkness, a foundational text in our syllabus that students are assigned to read before class for foundational knowledge.3 More specifically, English’s framework is integral to our approach, offering a tool to deepen our understanding of Walker’s art as a method of historical intervention. His analysis offers a solid framework for understanding how Walker’s silhouettes engage with and subvert an art form traditionally used to commemorate families as well as traditional landscape representations in art. By reading Walker’s silhouettes as a form of “landscape”—where human figures are placed within a spatial context that is not neutral but fraught with historical meaning—English underscores the way in which Walker’s art destabilizes historical narratives of power, race, and the construction of national identity, using the landscape to “absorb and amplify the power of rhetorical, political, and historical representations”.4

English suggests that Walker’s art operates within a space of “crisis”, where conventional historical tropes are deconstructed. For English, the landscape in Walker’s works is not simply a passive backdrop but an active space of historical and social tension. Her silhouettes become a method of “dismantling” the landscape of American history—the idyllic, pastoral visions of the American dream are interrupted by grotesque, disturbing representations of racial violence, exploitation, and domination.5 In this way, Walker forces the viewer to confront uncomfortable truths about the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racial inequality. Walker’s work, therefore, is not just about revisiting history but about making it feel present, real, and ongoing. In this way, Walker challenges her spectators, in this case, our classroom, to question how history is ever so relevant in contemporary struggles over race, power, and representation worldwide.

Representations of race and ethnicity are never neutral; they inherently reflect and reinforce structures of power. Stephen Spencer, for example, argues in Race and Ethnicity: Culture, Identity and Representation that visual portrayals play a critical role in shaping social hierarchies and collective understandings of identity (Spencer 2014). Stuart Hall’s concept of “the work of representation” further emphasizes that cultural artifacts do not simply mirror reality but actively construct and contest dominant narratives of race, nationhood, and belonging (Hall 1997). Within this framework, Walker’s haunting imagery challenges the visual codes that have historically marginalized Black bodies, positioning her work within broader debates on equity, rights, and social transformation. Engaging with these perspectives deepens the understanding of how representation functions as both a tool of oppression and a means of resistance, underscoring the ways in which art intervenes in social and political discourse.

We also grapple with the question of racial trauma and its lasting effects in both historical and contemporary contexts. Here, Robert T. Carter’s discussion of race-based traumatic stress proves especially relevant, illustrating how repeated experiences of overt or insidious racism can lead to deep psychological harm (Carter 2007). Walker’s stark depictions of enslaved people in peril, sexualized violence, and dehumanizing colonial tropes confront students with the reality that racial trauma is neither confined to the past nor limited to explicit forms of violence. Instead, it persists through cultural narratives, systemic inequalities, and inherited pain. Reflecting on these insights, our class debates how works like The Means to an End powerfully illustrate the interconnectedness of social injustice, racial trauma, and the ongoing struggle for collective healing. In doing so, we create space for empathy, accountability, and the recognition that art is a vital medium for both witnessing trauma and imagining a more just society.

Additionally, these contexts augment our discussions of Walker’s identity formation, particularly as it converges with her depictions of black womanhood under historical and contemporary oppression. Crucial to understanding the force of Walker’s narratives is her own biography. Born in Stockton, California, Walker initially grew up in a region with a relatively integrated racial climate before relocating as a teenager to Stone Mountain, Georgia, notable for being the birth place of the Ku Klux Klan, where she directly witnessed a deeply segregated society.6 Scholars such as Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw have demonstrated that these early experiences and confrontation with southern racial hostility in Walker’s formative years profoundly shaped the themes of identity, slavery, and racialized violence. Examining these social, emotional, and racial landscapes not only enriches our interpretation of her work but also brings urgency to discussions about how identity and place can shape artistic production and cultural critique.

An essential aspect of these discussions stems from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989), a critical framework that examines how race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect to create distinct experiences of oppression and resistance.7 Earlier in the first semester, for our liberal arts program, we lay the groundwork for these discussions by exploring the politics of education and the significance of intersectionality in community-building. As part of this process, lecturers of the program share facets of our own identities, opening up a space for vulnerability and reflection. As a brown, first-generation academic, and Mexican immigrant raised in the United States, I bring my own lived experiences into these conversations. I share how my identity as someone shaped by migration and race, for example, might influence both my understanding of art and my pedagogical approach.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands resonates deeply with my own lived experiences as a Mexican-American navigating the complexities of identity, belonging, and systemic barriers. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa describes the borderlands as both a literal and metaphorical space—one where cultures, languages, and histories collide, often violently, yet also where new identities emerge (Anzaldúa 1987). She writes, “the struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society”.8 My own life has been shaped by this in-between existence, where the tensions of migration, racial identity, and cultural hybridity have been both a challenge and a source of strength. Growing up in the United States, I existed between worlds—a Mexican child in a Texan classroom, an English learner in a system that demanded assimilation, a brown student in a school where Confederate flags adorned the trucks of my peers, a reminder that I did not fully belong. Anzaldúa writes about the pain of existing in a space where one is neither fully accepted nor fully erased, where one is both hyper-visible and invisible.

This awareness fueled a determination to carve out spaces of agency—not just for myself, but for others who, like me, existed in the dynamic space between cultures, histories, and expectations. As Anzaldúa writes, “living in the borderlands means you are neither hispana india negra española, ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed—caught in the crossfire between camps” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 194). This in-betweenness is not just a challenge, it is a powerful space of transformation. It allows for the possibility of seeing the world differently, of bridging divides, of challenging the narratives imposed.

Just as Walker’s silhouettes expose the hidden violence of history, our discussions challenge the erasures and exclusions that have shaped educational institutions for generations. By bringing these experiences into the classroom, a sense of solidarity and mutual respect is fostered, helping the classroom become more humanized. It also allows students to see that the themes of race, power, and resistance we discuss in our seminars and lectures are not abstract concepts but lived realities that shape all of our lives in different and complex ways. Furthermore, students—particularly those from marginalized backgrounds—are given a rare space in which their experiences are validated and reflected. In this context, the classroom becomes not only a site of intellectual engagement but a space for community-building and empowerment that has the potential to extend beyond the classroom, inspiring students to take action, whether through personal activism in and outside of their studies, professional practices, or a deeper commitment to social justice.

As Walker’s work brings into focus the legacies of racial violence, it also invites discussion on the ethics of representation and witnessing. By placing the viewer within the landscape of historical violence, Walker forces a confrontation with the viewer’s own complicity in these histories. In this sense, the act of viewing can become an ethical engagement, where the viewer is not merely an observer but a participant in the visual deconstruction of historical events and systems that have obscured the complexity of racial and sexual violence. This aspect of Walker’s art provides a valuable pedagogical opportunity, particularly in a classroom where many students have different relationships to these histories of oppression and resistance. The question of who gets to witness, who gets to be heard, and who gets to tell the story is central to some of our larger discussions.

This classroom environment encourages students to engage with these ideas critically, both emotionally and intellectually. Walker’s art provokes intense emotional responses, which creates a space for vulnerability and honesty as everyone is invited to examine their own relationships and those of their neighbors and peers to systems of oppression. The highly charged nature of Walker’s work encourages empathy—the ability to witness and feel the pain of others without becoming defensive or disengaged. Empathy, as a pedagogical tool, is instrumental in fostering an environment where students can confront complex ideas and challenging content. It is through this empathetic engagement that students are to reflect on their own roles in perpetuating or challenging systems of power.

In guiding peer group discussions where many emotions can surface, we take deliberate steps to ensure all voices are heard while maintaining respect. At the outset, we collectively agree on discussion norms and values, such as active listening without interruption, refraining from personal attacks, and using “I” statements when expressing emotions or critiques. If tensions escalate, I gently intervene to re-center the conversation on the artwork and its larger context, reminding students that critique should be directed at ideas rather than individuals. In instances of heated exchange, it is important to pause the group, validate all feelings, and ask students to restate each other’s points. This simple exercise of listening and paraphrasing often defuses conflict by fostering mutual understanding. We also acknowledge that these topics can be triggering, encouraging anyone feeling overwhelmed to take a brief pause or step out if necessary. I also remind students that learning about historical injustices is not a personal indictment of any one individual’s heritage but an invitation to collectively scrutinize the structures that have shaped contemporary society. Through this openness, discussions become a place where students see firsthand how the positionality of educators and learners alike can deepen our understanding of race, power, and representation.

In our approximate 120 min session, a group of approximately 3–4 students leads the session with an introduction. This includes some background information on Walker’s own lived experiences, a brief discussion of formal elements in Walker’s art, its overall reception, as well as some information on the text by English that was required reading for everybody in the classroom, sharing any specific and relevant passages that are also connected to a guiding question presupposed beforehand. This flipped classroom approach promotes critical engagement by fostering active study, encouraging students to take ownership of their learning and engage more deeply with both the works and the text, particularly when it comes to complex and emotionally charged topics like race and systemic oppression. It is this small group of students leading the classroom that also introduces a few key works of Walker’s that will be the focus of the session.

After this concise presentation, all of the students then break up into small groups of approximately 3–5 individuals where they are encouraged to share their interpretations of Walker’s work, led by an additional set of guiding questions. The brief group formation process is very welcome, as the movement around the room and organization process can oftentimes offer a bit of breathing space and room for reflection after the introduction to such powerful works. The small groups allow for more dynamic and student-led discussions, as students take on the responsibility of facilitating conversations and synthesizing ideas.

As is evident in the diverse reception of Walker’s work throughout her career among an abundant amount of supporters, participating art institutions, and critics, one of its strengths is its ability to provoke a wide range of responses, making it an ideal subject for peer-to-peer learning. In their small groups, students can feel more free to share their perspectives on the themes of race, power, and historical trauma that Walker addresses while also challenging each other to consider alternative viewpoints. Small-group discussions can also provide a more intimate setting for reflection, where students can explore the emotional and intellectual implications of Walker’s art in a supportive smaller environment. These discussions can be designed to encourage students to articulate their own emotional responses such as discomfort, anger, and/or empathy.

One work that is shown during these small-group discussions is Walker’s very first silhouette piece, entitled Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), which intentionally references Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind.

The piece’s title itself is a key to its meaning. Gone evokes the loss of a coherent historical narrative, a sense of absence, and the erasure of Black bodies from dominant historical accounts. The ironic play with the idea of romance in the title hints at the forced relationships, the systemic exploitation, and the perverse attraction between the oppressor and the oppressed. It reveals how the dynamics of slavery also involved the imposition of sexual labor, and the normalization of violence as a form of relational power. The title also alludes to the Lost Cause narrative—a romanticized portrayal of the South’s Antebellum period—as well as to the myth of the “contented slave” that misrepresents the true horrors of slavery. Walker critiques these myths, portraying a deeply painful, violent, and sexually charged reality.

In one section, the silhouette of a Black woman is shown in sexualized poses, often with exaggeratedly large, exposed breasts. These sexualized depictions are sharply juxtaposed with scenes in which the woman’s body is subject to the brutal violence and domination of white men. The overt sexualization of the Black woman’s body, combined with cruel depictions in which the body is both fetishized as an object of white male sexual desire and degraded, presents slavery as a deeply horrifying sexualized institution where Black bodies were both commodified and objectified. Walker’s exploration of this dynamic through the diverse silhouette figures forces the viewer to see the dehumanization of Black women as both a historical and ongoing crisis. Here, the insights of bell hooks provide a valuable framework for understanding how Black female bodies have historically been subjected to an objectifying, racialized gaze in dominant culture (hooks 1992). By explicitly foregrounding the agency of Black women—even as they occupy fraught historical and contemporary contexts—Walker’s work resonates with Hooks’s reimagination of Black representation in ways that dismantle oppressive gazes and opens up new possibilities for self-definition and resistance. For small-group discussions in class, this intersection of race and sexuality prompts the question of how such sexualized representations of Black women were used to justify systemic racial oppression, and how they still might linger in popular culture and media today.

After approximately 40 min of small-group discussions, the class reconvenes for a larger panel discussion as a unified group. In this format, some groups present unresolved questions, while others share their reflections and responses to the guiding questions. The larger panel discussion also provides an opportunity to make connections between the current session and either the previous one or the upcoming material, fostering continuity and deeper understanding across sessions. While the larger panel serves many purposes, one of the key objectives is integrating insights from the exchange within the small groups with contemporary issues currently unfolding.

In designing and refining this module over multiple semesters, a primary goal has been to equip students with both the historical context of Walker’s art and the critical tools to grapple with the visceral and, at times, disturbing images she produces. Ideally, if time allowed, we would devote two or more consecutive sessions to Walker’s imagery—allowing students to revisit themes, build on each other’s insights, and deepen their analyses. However, due to time constraints we solely focus on Walker’s work for one session, concluding with some structured moments of guided final reflection related to how understandings of the relationship between history, race, and art might have changed. Students are invited to write these in their personalized, private online Notion accounts customized to serve our core modules, or share verbally. This approach not only gives students a sense of continuity but also clarifies how the lesson fits within the broader curriculum.

Student responses have ranged from shock and discomfort to profound engagement and renewed curiosity about how art intervenes in social justice discourses. In repeated iterations of this lesson, I intend to introduce small-group check-ins and check-outs as well as the opportunity to continue guided reflection outside the regular course meeting time. These reflection themes would fuse artistic and historical reflection, debates and controversies in representation, intersectionality and gender, ethical engagement with histories, and personal reflection in a workshop held alongside our program’s Reflection and Connection Team (ReCo) of student assistants to further support students who wish to continue navigating the challenging material. Ultimately, by linking Walker’s work to an ongoing conversation about representation, ethical viewing, and the politics of memory, the lesson has the potential to function as a space for students to experiment with collective meaning-making—one that continues to evolve with each new cohort.

In our discussions, it is clear that Walker’s work resonates deeply within the context of contemporary political struggles. In a world where racial injustice continues to be a central issue in movements like Black Lives Matter, Walker’s art provides an avenue to reflect on how historical trauma, contemporary resistance, and the criminalization of Black bodies and police brutality are interconnected. Furthermore, in light of the global resurgence of populist, right-wing politics, debates around national identity, and the reconciliation of colonial pasts, our discussions surround an interrogation of how power operates through cultural and historical imagery. Even though Walker’s works were created more than two decades ago, their relevance has only intensified, making it urgent to engage with them today. As migration policies in the West become increasingly restrictive, with U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to challenge birthright citizenship and expand deportation measures disproportionately affecting non-white immigrants, the need to examine historical narratives of race and exclusion is pressing. Walker’s art becomes, in this sense, a tool for historical and political intervention—a space where the past and present collide, offering new ways of seeing, remembering, and acting. In this context, the power of visual culture to expose, challenge, and reframe histories becomes all the more essential. Walker’s place in contemporary African American art—her ability to illustrate generational and political divides—can help students and faculty alike make sense of these ongoing crises.

By the end of the session, we have briefly navigated the complexity and layered tensions of race, sex, desire, and violence in Walker’s work through all 40 something different perspectives, backgrounds, experiences, and worldviews that we collectively bring to the classroom. I want to acknowledge that my approach as a lecturer is continually evolving, and I do not presume to have perfected this practice. These are the takeaways I have gleaned as I strive to refine this module, mindful that we live in a time when addressing racist policies and white supremacist ideologies is crucial to our collective understanding and future. My hope is that these reflections, along with the debates and classroom strategies presented here, can help other faculty consider how to incorporate Walker’s approach to visuality, intersectionality, and power into their own teaching practices.

In the 120 min session, we have touched upon many of the “laundry list of dynamic oppositional entanglements” present in Walker’s work, as described by English: black and white, death and birth, violence and pleasure, and seeing and imagining9, and developed a deeper awareness of how these oppositions shape not only the art we engage with but also the world we inhabit. As the students slowly begin to pack up and make their way across campus for another course, it is my hope, like that of English, that we have begun a broader cultural conversation about the nature of power, history, and identity and that this conversation continues facilitating a virtually unlimited number of different perspectives on its meaning10 well beyond the walls of the classroom.