Bianca Walker

Lives and works in New Orleans, LA, USA

Artist statement

The works are portraits of blackness. The paintings are direct references to archival photographs taken of working-class black people during the early 1900s. I chose to become a portrait artist and bring attention to these photographs that I didn't have the privilege of coming across until my early 20s. I felt that these images being freely available to the public was incredible and wanted to help make the public, especially black people, aware of these images that are essentially theirs. I paint using a technique utilizing bottles to drip house paint onto drop cloth. The drop cloth is always left unstretched and cut into various shapes and sometimes tied to found wood. Representing my people in this way feels cathartic in that it’s freeing to be presented organically through paint from a time when our current ideals of freedom are hard to see. The raw materiality of the painting is reverence for a people whose freedoms didn’t lie within current ideas of luxury but in the self-sustainability of their labor. I use the scraps of the paintings to create stop-motion videos that honor this labor. The fabrics are collaged into vibrant scenes of a singular repetitive action. The staccato pacing of the fabric creates a beautiful rhythmic chaos reflecting labor as a joyous act. The primary goal of my practice is to create work that shows the black working class as beautiful in itself, even during periods of exploitation.

Artwork