Frick Museum installed at the Breuer Whitney

Sikkema Jenkins and Co, New York Sept 8 to Oct 21 2017

I walked into Sikkema Jenkins today expecting the usual sharp, clean edges of Kara Walker’s silhouettes, but what I found was something much more raw and chaotic.

The title of the show is a mouthful of 19th-century carnival barker bravado, but the work inside feels like a visceral rejection of the “blockbuster” expectations placed on her. Instead of paper cut-outs, the walls are covered in massive, gestural works using Sumi ink, oil stick, and collage on paper and linen. Pieces like U.S.A. Idioms and Christ’s Entry into Journalism are teeming with a kind of frantic, ink-splattered energy. Crowded scenes of protest, violence, and historical ghosts that feel like they were exorcised onto the page. There is a specific kind of “tiredness” mentioned in the press release (a fatigue with being a “role model” or a “voice”) and you can feel that weight in the brushstrokes. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and brilliant because it refuses to be polite or easily consumable. It’s like reading someone’s most private, feverish late-night sketches, only magnified to a monumental scale.