Join us for the opening of the exhibition Kara Walker: Back of Hand. Guests are invited to read and contemplate Walker’s work during a reception from 5-7 PM, to be followed by a talk and Q&A by curator Katie Geha and a reading by poet and artist Krista Franklin.

The Poetry Foundation’s presentation of Kara Walker: Back of Hand appropriately foregrounds Kara Walker’s long-term engagement with language and text. The exhibition features 2015 Book, a series of 11 typewritten pages with ink and watercolor illustrations, and two large-scale drawings, The Ballad of How We Got Here and Feast of Famine. Completed in 2021, this will be the first time these works are shown in Chicago.

New York-based artist Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Her work can be found in museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome; and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt.

Dr. Katie Geha is a writer, curator, and art historian. She is the director and chief curator of the galleries in the Lamar Dodd School of Art and its downtown outpost, the Athenaeum. Geha is currently researching the homes of Chicago imagist Roger Brown, connecting Brown’s domestic life with his paintings. She has organized exhibitions of work by Kara Walker, Lisa Tan, Paul Pfeiffer, Trevor Paglen, Tony Cokes, Amanda Ross Ho, and Rosemary Mayer, among others. Her writing on art has appeared in artforum.com, Art Papers, Burnaway, the Georgia Review, Harriet, and the Huffington Post.

Krista Franklin is a writer and visual artist. She earned her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College Chicago. She is the author of Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018) and the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, The Offing, Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, BOMB Magazine, Encyclopedia, Vol. F-K and L-Z, and the anthologies The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape (2018), The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015), and Gathering Ground (2006).

This exhibition comes to the Poetry Foundation from the Atheneum, part of University of Georgia’s (UGA) Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens, Georgia. The exhibition is curated by Katie Geha and organized by Katherine Litwin and Fred Sasaki.

Works in this exhibition contain strong imagery and content that may not be suitable for all viewers.

Image info: Kara Walker, The Ballad of How We Got Here, 2021

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Tags: Chicago, Harold Washington Library, Kara Walker: Back of Hand, Katie Geha, Krista Franklin, Loop, Poetry Foundation