SF MoMA, San Francisco, July 1 2024 – June 7 2026
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler.
Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners
Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious
by
Kara E-Walker
Kara Walker’s Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) is an intricate, imposing sculptural installation that confronts the viewer with the brutal machinery of empire, myth, and memory. In her signature fusion of historical allegory and visual spectacle, Walker constructs a haunting tableau.
The work centers on Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck and fate, reimagined through the lens of colonial violence. Mechanical elements suggest both the churn of progress and the dehumanizing gears of oppression — evoking the plantation, the empire, the factory, and the museum all at once. Figures emerge in silhouette or sculptural form, echoing Walker’s earlier cut-paper work but rendered here in three-dimensional space. It is monumental and inescapable.
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden is not a place of peace, but of decay masked as beauty. The “garden” is littered with the wreckage of history, and the “machine” is a self-perpetuating myth engine. It grinds trauma into iconography.
As with much of Walker’s work, the piece invites viewers into complicity: to witness, to feel, and to reckon with the myths they’ve inherited.