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

Next quotes

• Kara Walker:

  I trust my hand. If I go into a space with a roll of paper, I can make a work, some kind of work, a

• Kara Walker:

  I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the whi

• Kara Walker:

  I don't think that my work is very moralistic - at least, I try to avoid that. I grew up with that

• Kara Walker:

  I am performing this role of the artist and this role of the 'negress' coming into a white-box inst

• Kara Walker:

  I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, mora

• Kara Walker:

  There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was a

• Kara Walker:

  Sugar crystallizes something in our American soul. It is emblematic of all industrial processes. An

• Kara Walker:

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

• Kara Walker:

  A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpect

• Kara Walker:

  I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.