© Kara Walker
Currently not on view
The Means to an End ... a Shadow Drama in Five Acts,
1995
Kara Walker, born1969; Stockton, CA; active New York, NY
Printed by Steve Campbell
Published by Landfall Press, Inc., American, founded 1970
Printed by Steve Campbell
Published by Landfall Press, Inc., American, founded 1970
2015-9 a-e
Information
Title
The Means to an End ... a Shadow Drama in Five Acts
Dates
1995
Maker
Medium
Hard-ground etching and aquatint
Dimensions
sheet (each): 83.8 × 64.1 cm (33 × 25 1/4 in.)
frame (each, a & e): 95.5 × 65 × 4.5 cm (37 5/8 × 25 9/16 × 1 3/4 in.)
frame (b-d): 65.5 x 63.5 x 4.5 cm
Overall: 81.9 × 295.9 cm (32 1/4 × 116 1/2 in.)
Credit Line
Museum purchase, Felton Gibbons Fund
Object Number
2015-9 a-e
Place Made
North America, United States
Signatures
Signed and dated on (d), upper left: Kara Walker 1995
Inscription
Handwritten in graphite, along top of (b): RTP / A Means to An End
Handwritten in graphite, along top of (c): A Shadow Drama in Five Acts
Description
Like much of Walker's early work, The Means to an End... A Shadow Drama in Five Acts evokes the medium of cut-paper silhouettes popular in nineteenth-century America, but expanded in scale to fill a wall. According to the artist, the prints present "a panoramic view of an Antebellum swampland wherein mythic and stereotypic characters, Negro and otherwise, respond to outrageous demands with benign passivity. Illicit sex and violence are suggested as the means by which freedom is attained. The Master/slave narrative is expanded and inverted to include authoritarian control over children, the landscape and the self. From left to right this suite of aquatints reads like the table of contents in a romantic novel: The Beginning, The Hunt, The Chase, The Plunge, The End. The remainder of the story is couched in polite silence--the kind of silence which harbors racism, distrust, fear and intense and obsessive love."
Culture
Period
Materials
Techniques
- Joseph Ruzicka, Landfall Press: Twenty-Five Years of Printmaking (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1996), p. 79, p. 216
- "Walker Skirmish", Art on paper 4, no. 2 (Nov.-Dec., 1999)., p. 22-23 (illus.)
- Annette Dixon, ed., Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002)
- Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, "Censorship and Reaction", from Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke University Press, 2004), fig. 25
- "Acquisitions of the Princeton University Art Museum 2015," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 75/76 (2016-17): 102-125., p. 116 (illus.)
