Kara Walker: "African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas)", May 20, 2015 through November 01, 2015 (Image: DIG_E_2015_Kara_Walker_01_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2015)
Kara Walker: "African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas)", May 20, 2015 through November 01, 2015 (Image: DIG_E_2015_Kara_Walker_02_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2015)
Kara Walker: "African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas)", May 20, 2015 through November 01, 2015 (Image: DIG_E_2015_Kara_Walker_03_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2015)
Kara Walker: "African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas)"
DATES May 20, 2015 through November 01, 2015
ORGANIZING DEPARTMENT
Contemporary Art
COLLECTIONS
Contemporary Art
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Kara Walker: African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas)
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. A permanent version of one attendant is on view here, alongside a selection of sugar-related objects from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.
Walker’s installation references the decorative sugar sculptures known as “subtleties” that graced the dining tables of French and English aristocracy in the fifteenth century, a time when sugar was still a luxury item. Pretty and edible, subtleties were symbols of wealth and power, made from precious ingredients and often conveying pointed political messages.
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, Africa, and the Americas, and the enslaved people whose bodies and labor were the foundation of the sugar industry. Uncompensated and largely unacknowledged, 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.
Created in response to the history and physical space of the Domino building, which is saturated with the residue of almost 150 years of refining, Walker’s A Subtlety overwhelmed the visitor, in a sense dwarfing those who would consume her. Her attendants, disturbing and disarming in equal parts, can perhaps be seen as stand-ins for us, viewers of this colossus, and beneficiaries of this sticky history.
Rujeko Hockley
Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art
