Kara Walker’s ‘Jubilant Martyrs’ Acquired By High Museum
Artist Kara Walker spent her teenage years in Atlanta after her father, artist and professor Larry Walker, accepted a position at Georgia State University. Her family lived in Stone Mountain, home of the famous and controversial Confederate memorial carving. That carving, the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture, inspired Walker’s own monumental piece, “The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin.” It was recently acquired by the High Museum of Art and will on view starting next year.
Walker now lives in New York. In the public eye since the mid-1990s, she’s the MacArthur-winning artist behind an enormous sphinx made of sugar that was once housed in an abandoned Domino Sugar plant in Brooklyn.
Walker spoke with “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes about the High Museum acquisition along with the sphinx, entitled “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” and being a controversial artist in the public eye.