“A Subtlety” by Kara Walker: Installation Review

The first time I walked into the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn during spring break of my freshman year, the air still smelled faintly sweet. I had come alone, skipping the rest of my group's trip to the High Line because I needed to see this sculpture before it closed. When I turned the corner and saw her, a sphinx-like woman made entirely of white sugar, seventy-five feet long and thirty-five feet high, I stopped moving. Her features were exaggerated in ways that made me uncomfortable to look at directly, and smaller sculptures of children cast in molasses surrounded her like silent witnesses. I stood there for twenty minutes, unable to decide if I was supposed to feel awe or anger or both.

Kara Walker's "A Subtlety" forced me to confront how easily I had learned to separate beauty from brutality, and how American history hides its violence inside sweetness.

I knew Walker's name from an art history survey I had taken in high school, where we spent one day on her black paper silhouettes depicting plantation violence. My teacher had warned us before showing the slides. That preparation did not help me in the sugar factory. I had read about "A Subtlety" online and seen photographs, but standing in front of it was different. The installation officially titled "At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker presents, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant" occupied a space that had processed sugar for over a century. The building itself was about to be torn down for luxury apartments. Walker chose that moment and that place deliberately.

The sphinx figure at the center disturbed me because she mixed forms I recognized from different contexts. Her body was sphinx-like, borrowed from ancient Egypt and European neoclassical art, but her face carried the features of racist caricatures from minstrel shows and Aunt Jemima advertisements. Her head was wrapped in a kerchief. Her breasts and vulva were exposed and exaggerated. I watched other visitors take selfies in front of her, laughing, posing. Some touched her despite the signs asking them not to. I felt angry at them, then realized I was doing something similar by trying to process her through the language of formal art criticism I had learned in class. Walker was not letting anyone off easy. The material itself, refined white sugar, came from the labor of enslaved people who never tasted the profits of their work. The sphinx demanded worship while embodying the bodies that were broken to create her.

The smaller figures affected me even more. Fifteen sculptures of Black children and workers, cast in resin colored to look like molasses, were positioned around the factory floor. By the time I visited, several had melted or been damaged. Their faces had started to drip. Some had lost fingers or entire limbs to the heat and humidity. Walker had anticipated this. She knew sugar and molasses would decay, that the work itself would dissolve before the exhibition ended. I knelt down next to one boy carrying a basket, his features barely recognizable anymore, and I thought about how that dissolving was the point. The installation was not meant to last. The people whose labor built the sugar industry were not allowed to last in historical memory either. Their work was consumed, their names forgotten. The melting made that erasure visible.

Some critics argued that Walker went too far, that the racial caricature elements gave viewers permission to indulge in the same racist gaze the work was trying to critique. A few of my classmates said the same thing when I wrote about the installation for my composition class. They thought the sphinx was offensive for the sake of being offensive. I understood the argument, but I disagreed. If Walker had made the figure beautiful in conventional terms, visitors would have felt comfortable. They would have admired the craftsmanship and left. The discomfort was necessary. The sphinx looked back at everyone who looked at her. She occupied space the way monuments to Confederate generals occupy space, except she refused to be noble or dignified. She showed what American prosperity was built on and dared visitors to keep smiling for their photographs.

I visited the Domino Factory twice more before the installation closed, bringing my roommate the second time and going alone again on the last weekend. Each time I noticed different things: the way light came through the broken windows, the graffiti on the walls behind the sphinx, the smell that never quite left. The building was demolished four months later. The luxury condos went up the following year. I sometimes think about where all that sugar went after Walker's crew dismantled the sphinx, whether it was discarded or redistributed or simply washed away. The installation existed for less than three months, but it taught me that art does not have to be permanent to leave a mark. Some truths need to be shown once, directly, in a form that refuses to be ignored or comfortably remembered. I still cannot look at a sugar packet without thinking of her.

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