The youngest artist to have received the esteemed MacArthur Fellows Award, Kara Walker is noted for a body of work comprising near to life-sized silhouettes that are influenced by the popular imagery of the ante-bellum South. While Walker's tableaux are elegant and lyrical, the characters in her narratives reveal the complex human interactions that constitute the conditions of racism and slavery. Slavery, Slavery! will be the centerpiece of three works on view at the 25th Sao Paulo Bienal. Click here (slide show) to see some of Kara Walker's works.

Ms. Walker's work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions at museums and art centers in the U.S. and abroad. Among them are the Fine Arts Gallery of Vanderbilt University (2001); Centre d'Art Contemporain, in Geneva, Switzerland (2000); The Hammer Museum and Cultural Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (1999); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, both 1997. She has participated in many international group exhibitions including La Belle et La Bête, Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris (1995); Conceal/Reveal, SITE Santa Fe (1996); the 1999 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and the 1999 Istanbul Bienale. Ms. Walker holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island and she joined the faculty of the Department of Arts at Columbia University in September,2001.

Established in 1951, the São Paulo Bienal is considered one of the most significant contemporary visual art exhibitions in Brazil and in the world. The 2002 event, under the artistic direction of Alfons Hug – the first foreigner in charge of this event – will have as its major theme "Iconografias Metropolitanas," showing the role of big cities on today's arts. Works of artists representing 60 countries will be on view from March 23 to June 2, 2002 at Pavilhão Bienal, in Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo. For more information call 55-11- 5574-5922, ext.264/265.

For more information on the work of Kara Walker, please visit the following sites: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/walker_kara.html http://www.reviewny.com/current/98_99nov_15/review3.html http://sheldon.unl.edu/HTML/ARTIST/walker_K/SSII.html http://www.broadartfoundation.org/collection/walker.html http://www.carnegieinternational.org/html/art/walker.htm http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/provocations/kara/2.html