Peachy the Magazine August September 2014 | Page 95

ART + ARCHITECTURE

Caricature and Social Activism
A Sugar Baby in Brooklyn Segues to Daumier in Santa Barbara

S

She is enormous, sugar-coated, sexually super-charged and absurdly enigmatic. The first foray into sculpture by
artist Kara Walker, a massive sphinxcum-mammy coated in 35 tons of sugar
which has lorded over the Brooklyn
waterfront in the Domino Sugar Refinery this summer, appears to be one
massive looming paradox. Even the
title of the work, A Subtlety, is a blatant,
baffling contradiction, for the work is
anything but. The title is also a reference to confections presented at medieval feasts. “Subtleties” were sculpted
to celebrate a certain dignitary or event,
or even to convey a nuanced political message, and would have been

WRITTEN BY

Kitty Garner

considered the ultimate gastronomic
luxury due to sugar’s rarity, perhaps
the medieval equivalent of white
truffles from Alba. The subtitle, “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,” provides a few more
clues to the riddle embodied by the
Sugar Baby, but simultaneously
sweeps in additional inscrutable
implications. The Sugar Baby is a
veritable matryoshka doll of themes,
stereotypes and questions.

In this video, Art21 takes an in-depth
look at the creation of Kara Walker’s
monumental public project, A Subtlety,
or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), at
the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn.

AUGUST SEPTEMBER 2014

93