Hilton Als on “The Sugar Sphinx” for The New Yorker
May 9th, 2014
The buzz has been palpable around Kara Walker’s installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in the lead up to its public opening on May 10. For The New Yorker, the esteemed critic Hilton Als has written one of the most thought-provoking pieces so far. “Operating from the assumption, always, that history can be found out and outed,” Als writes, “Walker’s sphinx shows up our assumptions: She has ‘black’ features but is white? Has she been bleached—and thus made more ‘beautiful’—or is she a spectre of history, the female embodiment of all the human labor that went into making her?”
