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I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know what it was I wanted to say.

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.

From Kara Walker

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.

From Kara Walker

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.

From Kara Walker

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

From Kara Walker

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

From Kara Walker

To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what's not working and challenge it. You riff on things.

From Kara Walker

I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.

From Kara Walker

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

From Kara Walker

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.

From Kara Walker

Kara Walker

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