Peachy the Magazine August September 2014 | Page 97

ART + ARCHITECTURE

Still, once you make this leap and posit
that the Sugar Baby signifies female
black power, questions lurch in and the
notion becomes problematic. Why is the
Sugar Baby white when she certainly
should be brown, the color not only
of African skin but also of raw sugar?
And although she seems to have eyes,
there are no pupils. Is this the result
of some violence waged against her?
And why would she retain the kerchief
unless it was being worn sardonically,
as a paradoxical symbol of power? The
Sugar Baby is a caricature of a mammy
and a sex object—how do these absurd

Photo: Ian Crowther via flickr.

which Walker has addressed ad nauseum in her prior works: the negress of
the slave-owning South and the hypersexualized black female. The head
of the Sugar Baby explores the former, with the kerchief suggesting the
mammy “house-girl” who cared for
the white children and looked after the
needs and whims of her mistress. The
body of the Sugar Baby addresses the
latter, with enormous breasts, protruding buttocks and a quite visible vulva.
However, while Walker’s prior works
cast the negress as a helpless victim, the
Sugar Baby evokes power and control.
The positioning of her left hand seems
to connote assertive power as well, as
she seems to be giving us the finger.

characterizations, even in the form of a
sphinx, elicit power? Walker revels in
our confusion and in the fact that this
immersive work makes us feel uncomfortable on many levels. Throughout
her career she has made a practice
of posing troubling, unresolvable questions in her work by appropriating racist imagery in an open-ended fashion.
The Sugar Baby is no exception. Walker
commented, “If I have done my job
well, she gains her power by upsetting
expectations, one after the other.”
The work is further complicated by
references to the sugar trade inherent
in the composition of the work and its
venue, for in the nineteenth century
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