#a subtlety

Kara Walker's An Audience (2014) is a 27-minute video of audience reactions to A Subtlety..., the 75-foot sugar sphinx Walker installed in the soon-to-be-demolished Domino Sugar Factory on the Brooklyn waterfront in the summer of 2014.

After the success of her sugar sphinx, the artist is a whole different kind of public figure — and figuring out a whole new approach to public art.

By

DOREEN ST. FÉLIX

Artist: Kara Walker Title: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby 2014 http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/

I loved last summer’s site specific installation by Kara Walker in the old Domino Sugar Factory Warehouse launched by Creative Time. But when #BKMContemporary curator Eugenie Tsai came to me with the suggestion that maybe we install one of the sugar babies in the museum galleries, I nearly broke out into hives. Or more specifically bug bites.

What often makes an artist’s temporary installation exciting and fresh is not easily translatable into an artwork for collection. Many of the sugar babies in the warehouse were cast from sugar and molasses. These were left exposed to the somewhat open environment to melt and transform during the installation. The process was both evocative and challenging, and as an art conservator who is charged with preserving artwork, completely freeing.

However, when an artist wants to take a moment or a portion of a site-specific, temporary installation and create an object that then lives independently from that installation, a different approach needs to be brought to the table.  

This sculpture of an African boy attendant with bananas is cast in resin and coated with molasses and dark brown sugar. Displaying a sculpture with molasses and sugar in a museum environment would expose the collection to great risk of pests. Mice, cockroaches, and other insects would be attracted to the thick sugar and molasses coating. Both are damaging to artworks and in turn they could attract other insects that are even more damaging to artworks, such as carpet beetles, and webbing cloths moths. Infestations can occur very quickly and be difficult to control and eradicate completely. Even though the artist prefers that the sculpture be displayed in the open, in thinking about life independent from the sugar factory, she designed a specific platform and vitrine to be used when the work is displayed in museum environments. The work, although quite different, remains arrestingly beautiful and provocative.

From May to July of 2014, a colossal sugar-coated sphinx occupied the site of the soon-to-be-demolished Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Crowds filled the interior of the space to experience A Subtlety, Kara Walker’s first large-scale public project. A nearly forty-foot-tall sculpture of a black woman, a hybrid sphinx-mammy depicted nude and kerchiefed, was accompanied by a retinue of life-size attendants made out of sugar and corn syrup who melted dramatically over time. Now, a permanent version of one attendant is now on view alongside a selection of sugar-related objects from our collection. 

The attendant featured in this installation, a doe-eyed black boy carrying a bushel of bananas is based on a desktop curio. Paired with sugar bowls and other items, the figure highlights the impact on material culture of the triangular trade between Europe, Afirca, and the Americas, and the enslaved people whose bodies and labor were the foundation of the sugar industry. Uncompensated and largely unacknoledged, their work enabled the titanic market growth, associated wealth, and consumer accessibility of a commodity central to European and American economies from the sixteenth century on. 

Explore this sticky history through African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas) and other #BKMdecarts items now on view in our 5th floor elevator lobby.