Kara Walker | Porgy & Bess

Kara Walker

Porgy & Bess 

San Francisco, USA: Arion Press, 2013 

136 pp., 32.2 x 25 cm., leather-backed patterned boards, slipcase

Edition of 400 signed and numbered copies

In 2011, Kara Walker's friend Alicia Hall Moran was cast as Bess in the Broadway revival of the controversial Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. The artist attended rehearsals with her sketch book, in an attempt to “to understand the music, and to allow myself to get caught up in the fantasy of theatre.”

She had promised the producers that her drawings would not be sold, creating a dilemma when Arion Press approached her about illustrating a limited-edition Porgy & Bess libretto. 

“I wasn’t sure how to approach it, because I was tied to not working with my original sketches,” Walker told ArtNews. “I tried a lot of different things—some drawings I found too cartoony, some were kind of scratched into a photosensitive film. I found the process irksome, a bit like scraping fingernails on a blackboard.”

The resulting publication features Walkers first set of lithographs. Her sixteen illustrations accompanying the text and lyrics bay DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. 

 

"[The characters] have become archetypes of another no less grand drama, that of: ‘American Negroes drawn up by white authors, and retooled by individual actors, amid charges of racism, and counter charges of high-art on stage and screen, in the face of social and political upheaval, over generations.

Because they are fraught, I chose to simply let them be paper cut-out caricatures whose full dimensions are alluded to by rubbing. In a sense I wanted to subject those paper figures to pressure, satisfying some implied demand that the artist perform with due diligence, and unpacking of the signifiers ‘Porgy’ and ‘Bess’. But haven’t they been through enough heartbreak?”

- Kara Walker, artist's statement