Today, Film at Lincoln Center announced that artist Kara Walker designed the official poster of the 59th New York Film Festival (September 24 – October 10). Walker joins a lineup of renowned artists who have contributed their work to the festival, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, John Waters, and Laurie Simmons. Designed by a new artist yearly, the feat has become an honorary role for artists. Over the years, the special posters have taken on an cultural significance, as they reflect the themes explored in each edition’s film selections.
“I photographed the two cut paper figures silhouetted against the white backdrop of a shadow puppet screen in a number of cryptic scenarios. The initial result had the tonal quality of a grainy black-and-white film clip, but I was annoyed that there was no actual story. In post production—meaning, while fiddling with Photoshop—I cropped another of the characters from the shoot: the figure of a raging, menacing jackbooted man with a little red tissue paper around him. As I moved that crop around, it fit neatly into an outstretched hand like the cellphone that was missing all along. Suddenly, it is two women watching a man behave in some kind of way, as if fictional character Topsy foiled evil plantation master Simon Legree by filming him and then sharing it. The many events we are witness to, both absurd and horrifying, grand and quotidian, that are shared on small screens, resonated as a counterpoint to the legacy of cinema and the history of the New York Film Festival. What to make of the amateur filmmakers equipped with just cell phones and a critical eye?” Says Walker of her design.
Kara Walker is known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and history, her distinctive silhouettes have been exhibited around the world. Walker’s work has been acquired by prominent museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe, including the Kunstmuseum Basel’s Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the National Museum of 21st-Century Arts (MAXXI), Rome; and the Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt.
Being selected by the Tate Modern for the 2019 Hyundai Commission, Walker responded with a large-scale public sculpture in the form of a four-tiered fountain entitled “Fons Americanus,” a subversive “counter-memorial” to the Victoria Memorial at Buckingham Palace. A solo exhibition of her works on paper, entitled “Kara Walker: A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be,” is currently on view at Kunstmuseum Basel through September 26, 2021; it will travel to Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany, and the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg, the Netherlands.
Further expressing that she is more than her silhouette work, Walker completed her first large-scale public project in 2014, commissioned and presented by Creative Time. The installation entitled “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant,” was on view at the abandoned Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The project was a massive sugar-covered sphinxlike sculpture, meant to respond to and reflect on the troubled history of sugar.
The limited edition poster will be available for purchase during the New York Film Festival via Posteritati. Additionally, a limited number of posters will be available for purchase at Film at Lincoln Center’s merchandise store located in the Alice Tully Theater.
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