Kara Walker, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), work in progress, 2023-2024; © Kara Walker; photo: Ari Marcopoulos.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces additional details for its forthcoming installation by artist Kara Walker in the museum’s admission-free, street-level Roberts Family Gallery. The complete title for the presentation is Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) / A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. / Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners / Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious / by Kara E-Walker. It will open to the public on July 1, 2024, and remain on view through May 2026.
Walker has long been recognized for her incisive examinations of the dynamics of power and the exploitation of race and sexuality. Her work often leverages expressions of fantasy and humor to confront troubling histories and dominant narratives, repossessing control in the process. In the last decade, Walker has extended her practice beyond her signature cut-paper silhouettes and drawings to embrace monumental installations that further challenge communal memory as shaped and concretized through the institutions of state, museum and church. Featuring a complex landscape of mechanized sculptures and elaborate displays, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) marks Walker’s most ambitious large-scale public project to date.
Organized by Eungie Joo, SFMOMA’s curator and head of contemporary art, with whom Walker has worked multiple times over the past 27 years, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) is inspired by a wide range of sources, from antique dolls to Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, to Bunraku puppetry and historical ephemera. Through Walker’s singular vision, these disparate references come together to examine the fear and loss we experienced as a global society during the COVID-19 pandemic and to address more broadly the memorialization of trauma, objectives of technology and how we might transcend the ills that plague contemporary society. Automatons serve as stand-ins for human experience, situated within a vast garden of black obsidian—a volcanic glass with deep spiritual and material history thought to repel negative energies and heal past traumas. The work offers an energetically charged environment for reflection, healing, respite and hope, transforming the Roberts Family Gallery into a would-be natural history museum of the future. To create the elaborate presentation, Walker is collaborating with software engineer Noah Feehan, the engineering company Hypersonic, couturier Gary Graham and fabrication studio New Project.
To learn more about Kara Walker’s commission at SFMOMA, click here.