Kara Walker, Contemporary Art, and the Black Female Bottom

Why It Matters

Walker’s provocative use of the Black female bottom reshapes curatorial practice, compelling institutions to reckon with entrenched racial and gender biases while expanding the discourse on radical Black feminist art.

Key Takeaways

• Walker’s installations use decay to expose Black female bodily abjection.
• Barber’s book redefines Black women’s art as "undesirable representations."
• "A Subtlety" transforms sugar refinery into a nauseating racial critique.
• Black female bottom becomes central metaphor for power and oppression.
• Public sculptures challenge museum norms and demand new curatorial frameworks.

Summary

In a Courtauld Research Forum talk, UCLA assistant professor Tiffany Barber examined Kara Walker’s recent public sculptures, arguing that they foreground the "Black female bottom" as a site of both abjection and generative power. Drawing on her forthcoming book Undesirability and Her Sisters, Barber situates Walker’s work within a broader movement that refuses conventional, "acceptable" representations of Black women in contemporary art.

Barber outlines how Walker’s installations—most famously the 2014 "A Subtlety" at the Domino Sugar refinery and the 2019 "Fons Americanus" at the Tate—use scale, materiality, and sensory overload (molasses fumes, crumbling sugar bodies) to destabilize the ocular‑centric expectations of museum viewers. She links these tactics to recent theoretical turns in Black, feminist, and queer studies that celebrate "undesirable" bodies as sites of resistance, rather than objects of healing narratives.

The talk cites vivid moments: the sugar‑coated "babies" melting into molasses, the colossal sphinx with a mammy head, and the fountain that elevates a dismembered Black female form to the top of a column. Barber quotes scholars such as Christina Sharpe’s "monstrous intimacies" and Evelynn Hammonds’s notion of "dense black holes" to illustrate how Walker’s silhouettes invert traditional sexual and racial hierarchies.

Barber concludes that Walker’s emphasis on the bottom—both literal and metaphorical—forces museums, curators, and audiences to confront the lingering plantation logics that shape collection practices. By embracing negativity as a productive strategy, the work opens pathways for new curatorial frameworks that honor the complexity of Black female subjectivity and expand the market for radical, intersectional art.

Original Description

This talk will analyse the material and affective implications of internationally-recognised artist Kara Walker’s recent turn to public sculpture and the connections she draws between the rawness of slavery’s memory in the US and the UK. Her two anti-monuments, A Subtlety (2014) and Fons Americanus (2019), depart from the drawings and cut-vinyl tableaux for which Walker is most known, connecting two prominent locales within the Black Atlantic world’s development. This turning point in her practice pivots on Walker’s unruly manipulations of the Black female form, namely the mammy and the Sable Venus, into a kind of power bottom that forces a distinction between Black women’s creative labors (as artists and caregivers) and art’s capacity to mitigate historical trauma.

Dr Tiffany E. Barber is an award-winning scholar, curator, and critic whose work reshapes staid understandings of race, gender, and representation. A sought-after voice in contemporary art, culture, and fashion, her expert commentary spans academic journals, museum exhibitions, acclaimed documentaries, and major media outlets like The Nation and Huffington Post. As Assistant Professor of African American Art at UCLA, Dr Barber blends art history, performance theory, and Black feminist thought in ways that challenge institutions to advance new cultural futures. She is author of Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (NYU Press, 2025).

Organised by Professor Dorothy Price FBA, Executive Dean and Deputy Director, and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at the Courtauld Institute, as part of the Courtauld Centre for the Art of the Americas, directed by Professor Jo Applin.