Since the early 2000s, multimedia painter Kelley Walker (born 1969) has created work that alters and subverts some of our most ubiquitous social signifiers.
With nods to influences ranging from Pollock to Warhol to Polke, Walker’s work interrogates the ways a single image can migrate through a number of cultural contexts and the perpetual consumption and reuse of images. Black Star Press features work from Walker’s first solo American museum exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. A parallel to Warhol’s canonical 1964 painting “Race Riot,” Walker’s Black Star Press series comprises images of racial unrest that have been digitally printed on canvas, silkscreened with melted white, milk and dark chocolate, and rotated. Also included in this collection are selections from Walker’s Schema series. With essays by writer Hilton Als and curator Jeffrey Uslip, Black Star Press examines the art of overt visual manipulation.
