Kara Walker in San Francisco

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art  I saw  an intense  installation by Kara May Walker with robotic movement and frightening arms and bodies going up and down .

The title is

Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) A recipe for the Weary Time Traveler Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence  carried out by The Gardeners toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Species

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That’s the whole installaton from afar. When it was first created it had eight robots, now some of them no longer move, but the installation is still riveting

THis is Fortuna herself, a prophetess who orignally spit out fortunes to people.

“The paradox of Being Black is the condition of Not-being,” one read.

“Your last shred of dignity is often your best.”

“Loss is a heady thing our hearts cannot comprehend.”

Now she stands silently.

Here is a good article about the installation

this figure is near the window,  invoking a homeless man.

perhaps addicted to fentanyl.-

just ouside my door in Seattle in a park, I see many men and woman hanging in suspended  animation like this after  they take a dose  of  fentanyl

THis child and her puppet gaze around.  It echoes Walker’s Covid  experience, when she sought out an old doll for comfort.

This amazing work with its moving parts both fascinates and horrifies mre.

Walker speaks of dolls as “I thought about dolls as empathy machines, providing a service, and as some kind of magic object.”

“Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)” could be seen as a diorama of tomorrow, looking back at Black life in America “from the institution of slavery through the eviction of Black populations from inner cities like San Francisco,”

Kara Walker has also co curated the Monuments  exhibition  in Los Angeles, in  which artists repurposeConfederate bronze monuments.Her own piece is here using  part of a Stonewall  Jackson  equestrian monument.