Not very common that artists use the sugar as material for their sculptures. That’s what award-winning artist Kara Walker chose for her last creation. Walker’s monumental public project, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, is her homage to what she describes as “the unpaid and overworked artisans who have refined our sweet tastes from the cane fields to the kitchens of the New World.”
Kara Walker at her the Subtlety of the Marvelous Sugar Baby exhibition
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a sphinx-like naked matriarch with a Styrofoam core, rising over 30 feet high and coated in tons of white sugar. Visitors who explore the vast inner atrium of the dilapidated, sickly sweet-smelling Domino building will find it strewn with sculptures of young boys holding wicker baskets filled with unrefined sugar. Made from molasses, the figures are melting at an increasingly rapid rate now that the New York summer is finally taking hold, and what once were protruding limbs are now tarry mounds on the ground. That decomposition is intentionally symbolic – sugar cane was once fed into large mills by hand and slaves sometimes had arms torn off as a result.
Commissioned by Creative Time, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby is the first large-scale public project by Walker who is best known for her cut paper silhouette installations, drawings, and watercolors. A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby is on view until July 6, 2014. Thereafter, the factory will be demolished to make way for condominiums.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRkP5rcXtys[/youtube]
The Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn was once the source of more than half of the nation’s sugar.
Walker’s sculpture is a confounding conflation of stereotypes related to black women
