“Last year he asked me to give him a new body,” Walker said. She kept her project a secret from him and never got a chance to share it with him.
“My father would wonder why I would want to do something so far away from two-dimensional work,” she said, adding, “I like to think I was his best student, but I also had a mind of my own.”
Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, has not yet seen the new work. But looking back on the trajectory of Walker's work, she said: “What I admire is that Kara is such a powerful monument and the way she creates it,” she said.
“This work exists as a way for us to understand collective memory, moving us through a range of emotions: beauty, dystopian worldviews, perspectives on reality and imagination.”
David AM Goldberg, a senior product designer at Disney who contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue, said Walker’s automata “return to the harsh truths about farm relationships that we first learned from her through her silhouettes.” Now, with robotics, “she challenges herself to make it uncomfortable,” he added. Is it their blackness? Is it because they are not fluid, moving figures??”
Walker first confronted her fears about technology by participating in ChatGPT and writing fortunes provided by Fortuna. She used AI messages such as “African pessimism” and “liberation struggle.” But the results sounded trite. “I was like, ‘No, there has to be fire! There has to be soul!’” She wrote over 100 fortunes herself, proving that human emotions are not yet replaceable.
Standing alone in the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard, Fortuna stood upright with her arms outstretched to her sides. Among the lucky snow on her floor, one message stood out. “You can’t expect an artist to follow instructions.”