Untitled (The Last Taste)

Kara Walkers Untitled (The Last Taste) from 1997 is an etching with aquatint and spitbite on China paper chine colle that exemplifies the artists use of the 19th-century silhouette tradition to explore the history of race, gender, and power in America with a critical intelligence and visual sophistication that have made her one of the most important artists of her generation. Walker, who emerged in the mid-1990s with large-scale silhouette installations that reimagined the antebellum South as a nightmare of sexual violence and racial domination, extended her practice into printmaking with a series of etchings that apply the same critical framework to the history of American visual culture. The title The Last Taste suggests a sensory experience that is both final and residual, a flavor that lingers after the main course has been consumed, and the imagery of the print, which depicts a scene of racial and sexual violence rendered in the genteel medium of silhouettes and aquatint, creates a productive tension between the refinement of the technique and the brutality of the subject matter. The etching with aquatint and spitbite, a technique in which acid is applied directly to the plate with a brush to create tonal washes, allows Walker to combine the sharp edges of the silhouette tradition with the atmospheric effects of aquatint, creating a range of tonal values that gives the black silhouettes a sculptural presence against the atmospheric background. The chine colle technique, in which a thin sheet of China paper is laminated to a thicker support during the printing process, gives the image a delicacy of surface that contrasts with the violence of the content.

Walkers etchings are significant contributions to the history of American printmaking and the broader discourse on race and representation in American art. The combination of refined technique and brutal content in The Last Taste exemplifies her strategy of using the genteel traditions of 19th-century visual culture to expose the violence that underlies American racial history.

A 1997 etching with aquatint and spitbite on chine colle by Walker using the silhouette tradition to explore racial and sexual violence in America, creating productive tension between refined technique and brutal content in one of the most important print series of the late 20th century.