©2020 Hyperallergic Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Around this Sugar Baby are smaller dark figures of young black boys holding empty baskets or bunches of bananas. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts and periodic newsletters by email. Situated on the waterfront, developers have long been eyeing the attractive and large site in an area developing beyond its working-class roots at lightning speed. It’s worth mentioning that Two Trees’ owner, Jed Walentas, is on the board of Creative Time, which is the organization that commissioned Walker’s “A Subtlety.”. We can be bold in our sexuality. Some patrons mimicked the pinching of the sculptureâs nipples while others covered their mouths in shock. The installation is an homage to the many roles played by black women throughout their history in the New World. The figure has stereotypical features and is wearing a bandana headscarf reminiscent of the famous Aunt Jemima food logo. “The process is very wild and terrible, like a caged cyclone.”, Life in the refinery was so infernal that The New York Tribune declared in 1894 that a worker had only one hope of escaping “perpetual torture.”. The installation’s main feature is a 35 foot (10.6 m) tall sugar coated form of a black woman in a sphinx-like pose. The abandoned factory housing the installation once produced nearly half of all the sugar used in the United States. The voluptuous nude female figure with headscarf, in its crouching sphinx-like pose, makes references to the enduring role of black women as sex objects, nurturers and caretakers. Once New York may have turned away from its coastline, but today — even post-Hurricane Sandy — people are lining up to buy condos, walk on boardwalks, and take ferries on the city’s waterfront. Black women are accustomed to it. We understand black women's desire and pleasure in relation to the oppression weâve endured for centuries. We can be fierce. The Domino Sugar Factory has been a prominent fixture in the neighborhood since it opened in 1856 (though the current building dates to 1882), and by the 1890s it was producing half of the US’s sugar. A Scuffle Over Anti-Fascist Art in a German Museum, Explained, The Remarkable Success Story of Rosalba Carriera, the Original “Queen of Pastel”, Artists Like Jeffrey Gibson and Carrie Mae Weems Encourage Voting With New Billboards, French Museum Postpones Genghis Khan Exhibition, Accusing Chinese Authorities of Censorship. As recently as 2006, many in the neighborhood have fought to turn the Domino site into a cultural complex or other public facility, but the city, under the guidance of developer-friendly former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has been largely uninterested in doing anything but seeing it redeveloped. It is a towering sphinx-like sculpture, and as is to be expected, uses art to offer meaning. The scale of the Sugar Baby and the immense size of the factory space surrounding it suggest the corporate and political power of the sugar companies. Size. In feminizing her sugar baby, Walker is reversing the mark of shame feminist scholar bell hooks has famously said is associated with black bodies. Knowing this charged history, the Walker installation comes across less as provocative and more like a temple-like tribute to ancestors, relying on its impressive scale (the sphinx measures 35 feet high and 75 feet long) for most of its impact. The title, “A Subtlety,” refers to the medieval taste for elaborately sculpted sugar treats that marked the beginning or end of a course. These figures are enlarged versions of ceramic souvenir figurines produced in China and still popular today. Bold, black female sexuality is considered a weapon that must be quieted. An Audience / Rhapsody, 2014 ... African Boy Attendant Curio with Molasses and Brown Sugar, from "The Marvelous Sugar Baby" Installation at the old Domino Sugar Factory Warehouse. 2020 Bustle Digital Group. To better understand how the metaphor of disinformation-as-disease has appeared in popular culture, we need to discuss its origins in the idea of the body politic. You can learn more about A Subtlety here…, http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/, Your email address will not be published. As writer Kirsten West-Savali details, "Her vulva is exposed as if daring White patrons to look, touch and openly gawk at that which their ancestors took by force in slave quarters and parlors from Mississippi to Georgia.". Publicity photos of the great sphinx had been disseminated online long before the installation opened on 10 May. All rights reserved. Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety,” aka the “Marvelous Sugar Baby,” which comes with the substantial subtitle of “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,” is the renowned artist’s first public artwork. Thereâs nothing surprising about those responses to bold, black female sexual expression. Fox News anchor, Bill O'Reilly, was so appalled that he called the successful singer a bad role model for teenagers of color. It is unclear if Walker anticipated the sexualizing response the piece has received, but in an interview with the Art Newspaper, she said that when creating the installation, âI was thinking about sugar and the associations with desire.â. What comes next —condos? The scale of the Sugar Baby and the immense size of the factory space surrounding it suggest the corporate and political power of the sugar companies. Walker transformed Brooklyn’s iconic Domino Sugar Factory into a gallery space that housed the “marvelous sugar baby,” a sculpture roughly 70 feet long and 35 feet tall. When it opened, the building was the world’s largest sugar factory, but by 2004, when it closed, it was a ghost of its former self. Artist Kara Walker is accustomed to using her impressive installations to illuminate race, gender, and class issues. Fragmenting reduces black women to the sum of our body parts, and thus, strips us of our humanity. The sphinx is displaying the “fig gesture” with its left arm, which is a symbol that can mean both good fortune and “fuck you,” depending on your cultural perspective. The piece is situated in a highly contested space in Williamsburg: the former Domino Sugar Factory, a site that’s become a lightning rod for discussions about post-industrial urban identity, the moneyed forces of gentrification, and the uneasy relationship of arts patronage and developers. She is not reduced to her vagina or her nakedness, which is revolutionary in itself. Where Does the Idea of a Disinformation “Infodemic” Originate? And off on one side of the cathedral-like space is a glowing white sphinx, clearly constructed of blocks of sugar. Kara Walker is a contemporary African-American artist known for her provocative image and text based installations that comment on black lives from pre-Civil War America to today. We can be sexy without being hypersexualized. She is attempting to use art to force people to view black women as whole beings. It is called: 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. The figure, which is derived from racist mammy imagery, is an obvious thumb in the eye to an industry that enslaved millions. At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: 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 For many longtime area residents, the Domino plan represents the city’s cultural amnesia, a desire to scrub the neighborhood of its history — the factory was also the site of one of the city’s longest labor struggles, when, in 2000, 250 workers went on strike for 20 months. Hyperallergic is a forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about art in the world today. It also refers to the labor of slaves who worked in Caribbean cane fields to produce a luxury product for their masters. Walking behind the sphinx, her genitals are prominent and, along with her feet, beautifully sculpted. Made of polystyrene foam coated in white sugar, the sculpture depicts a “mammy-sphinx,” naked except for a kerchief tied around her head, breasts and genitalia exposed. We become defined and labeled by our body parts, like our asses. Rihanna also garnered a similar response when she chose to expose her nipples on the cover of Lui Magazine . 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Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Share Facebook Tweet Email It was mixed into a dirty slurry, boiled in enormous vats and filtered through charred animal bones. Walkerâs decision to feminize her sculpture is political, since the mammy has been historically asexualized as a form of protection and a way to create a dichotomy between ideal white women and unattractive, undesirable black women. Among her many awards she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” In 2014 Walker created a monumental sculptural installation at a decommissioned Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York.
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