In New York Magazine’s Art and Design issue, Doreen St. Félix profiles Kara Walker, who, following her 2014 sphinx sculpture, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, is planning her next act — how to solve the problem of politics in art. “I am still wrestling with my relationship to what my art might do in the public space,” she tells St. Félix. “How I can control it.”
As New York’s photo department was researching pictures of Kara Walker, senior photo editor Roxanne Behr says they kept coming across intimate portraits of her taken by her partner, the photographer Ari Marcopoulos. “We decided to call Ari and asked him to spend a week documenting Kara’s life as an artist,” says Behr. “By collaborating with Ari, we had the chance to see intimate scenes that a produced photo shoot we could not have captured. The shirt she is wearing on the cover is one she bought in Brazil in 1999.”