Kara Walker quotes:

I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.

I know that in my family there are histories of violence that are internal family things and that are oftentimes dealt with internally. By internally, I mean inside the family group, but also partly inside ourselves. You know, self-hatred and hostility and rage and this cycle that won't break.

I grew up partially around Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in that part of the country, there was always this aura of mythology and palpable sense of otherness about being a Southerner.

Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.

Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

Sugar crystallizes something in our American soul. It is emblematic of all industrial processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White being equated with pure and 'true': it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.

I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things - genre paintings, historical paintings - the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society.

There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.

I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.

I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does.

If you're a Black artist, you could paint a wall of smiley faces, and someone will still ask you, 'Why are you so angry?'

Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about.

I trust my hand. If I go into a space with a roll of paper, I can make a work, some kind of work, and feel pretty satisfied.

My work is really abject and self-effacing sometimes. I mean, it's big and overwrought, but it's just paper dolls, and it's kind of silly.

I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen knife and some people she'd like to kill

Humor's always been the problem of my work, hasn't it? When working, I feel satisfied when I surprise myself. And when I surprise myself, I wind up laughing.

I took a political stance early on, but I don't think my work is overtly political. I respond to events.

It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.

I don't think that my work is very moralistic - at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that sermonising tendency, and I don't think visual work operates like that.

I've seen people glaze over when they're confronted with racism, and there's nothing more, you know, damning and demeaning to having any kind of ideology than people just walking the walk and saying what they're supposed to say and nodding, and nobody feels anything.

I have no interest in making a work that doesn't elicit a feeling.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

I don't think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history. I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.

I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without the 'struggle?'

Silhouettes are reductions, and racial stereotypes are also reductions of actual human beings.