•  
  •  
 

Marika Preziuso

Abstract

In late Spring 2014, the nonprofit organization Creative Time commissioned artist Kara Walker to create her first large-scale public installation. Hosted in the industrial relics of the legendary Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was as controversial as it was revered. The powerful presence of the installation, coupled with its immersion in historical consciousness, makes A Subtlety rich in educational value. This article engages in a comparative reading of A Subtlety in the light of female writers and thinkers from the Caribbean, but also incorporates some of the generative questions Walker’s installation has provoked my students to ask. I especially engage questions on how to unravel the mixed metaphors that make A Subtlety the artistic embodiment of the textured experience of the African diaspora, with its complex history, cultural hybridity and transnational ramifications. While Walker’s installation seems to sustain its many layers of meanings through both form and content, the (mostly white, US-born) students in my class have responded to it in a range of critical ways that pointed especially to their emotional and critical response toward female Blackness, and reflections about the artist’s responsibility toward her intention. The article reflects on the inherent possibilities for teaching A Subtlety and other forms of what I consider “vulnerable art,” which at its best helps to channel our collective and personal discomfort in effective, healing ways.

Author Biography

Marika Preziuso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt). Marika holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Caribbean Diaspora and a MA in Gender, Society and Culture, both from the University of London, UK. At MassArt she teaches courses on diasporic and multicultural literature, Latin American and Caribbean literature. In 2014, Marika co-edited the collection of essays, Migrant Identities of Creole Cosmopolitans, published by Peter Lang, with Dr. Nirmala Menon, India Institute of Technology (IT).

Download

Share

COinS