Kara Walker "Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale"
Lehmann Maupin (201 Chrystie Street)
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Lehmann Maupin Gallery in collaboration with Sikkema Jenkins & Co., present "Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale", a joint exhibition of new works by Kara Walker. Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Walker will present three new video works, which draw on her own experience in the Mississippi Delta, “a region mythologized in song and popular culture but tragically depressing.” She explains, “I drove down to the Delta thinking about the terrors of Jim Crow and slavery, yet the silent indifference of the landscape and the economic stasis, lack of mobility, and the persistence of a racist memory in the area was what stuck.”
Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale is a shadow puppet narrative, which follows the travails of the heroine, Miss Pipi, intercut with shadow puppet “abstracts” of a surreal and violent nature. The subtext of the video is the mythology surrounding white Southern womanhood, historically cited time and time again as an entity to be protected from sexuality, in particular from the presumed hyper-sexuality of black men. Although fiction, this was the excuse for the murder of countless black men and boys in Jim Crow America. Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale is meant to be as deeply contradictory a visual tale as the Blues is in music. Delta Blues often merges broad comedy with despair, sensuality with loss and do-it-yourself urgency with structured improvisation.
[Image: Kara Walker "Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale" (video still detail) (2011)]
Media
Schedule
from April 21, 2011 to June 04, 2011