MFA Boston, review by Holly Moniz

Big Piece, Bigger Ideas By Holly Moniz

            At fifteen feet tall and thirty-three feet wide, the sheer size of artist Kara Walker’s The Rich Soil Down There (2002) seems to overpower and captivate its onlookers as they stroll through the Contemporary Art wing in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The cut-paper silhouettes seem to call out, “Yoo-hoo! Come look at us… You know you want to!” Upon closer inspection, however, the smaller details hidden in the black and white silhouettes is what truly keeps the piece’s audience pacing back and forth in front of the enormous gray wall as they try to decipher what Walker’s scene is really saying.

            As is prevalent throughout Walker’s work, The Rich Soil Down There deals with racial tension in history in an oddly beautiful but darkly twisted way, creating an overall sense of doubt and irony.

On the right-most side of the wall, a full-lipped black female silhouette carries a white female silhouette while a castrated black male silhouette carries a white male silhouette. As you continue walking to the left down the wall, you come to understand that the black figures represent southern black slaves and the white figures represent the southern upper class white folk of antebellum America.  But is it really that simple?

            Only using black and white paper forces each onlooker to view each silhouette in terms of their color and interpreted race. However, as you return to the right side of the wall, it becomes obvious that each figure’s race does not strictly correspond to the color of their paper. In fact, all four of the right-most figures’ facial features actually appear anatomically African, even though two were cut from white paper. By deconstructing each of her figures to their outermost shell of a silhouette, we are left looking at the most basic layer of Walker’s silhouettes, just as stereotypes strip each of us of our individuality to allow for the formation of social prejudices against certain groups of peoples.

            Walking back to the left side of the wall, we see the feet of two black figures covered in what appears to be white slime. At first glance, you may wonder “what is that?” but looking up at the far left corner, a black bird comes into view, and the same white slime covering the black figures is falling from the bird’s tail. Suddenly, it all clicks. The black slaves have covered themselves in white bird excrement.  

            Walker uses this image to play on the title of her piece in a darkly humorous way. It’s as though the slaves needed to cover themselves in crap to be white, but Walker refers to the southern whites as “rich soil,” essentially calling the racists of the antebellum time period dirt, crap, or another cruder word along those lines.

            Walker’s approach to depicting a pre-Civil War America in silhouette may be simple, but the ideas she relays are immensely intricate, and I encourage all to venture to Boston’s MFA to take in the entire 495 ft² piece.