Kara Walker

A Special Attraction depicts a white sphinx in profile, around which a number of brown figures are engaged. Kara Walker created this drawing in response to her 2014 installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, presented at the defunct Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, New York. That installation featured an enormous sphinx sculpture made out of white sugar, surrounded by “tar babies,” or small sculptures of laboring Black boys she fashioned from molasses. In these works, Walker contends with the historical relationship between sugar production and slavery. As she explained, “I wanted to draw a bridge between themes-not just between slavery and the sugar trade, but between industry and waste-spawned by the fact that molasses is a by-product of processing sugar. And for me, that represents a metaphor for identity formation.”

This watercolor addresses the complicated and brutal histories of slavery and the sugar trade. A Special Attraction depicts small figures climbing upon the enigmatic landscape of a large white sphinx. A person at the bottom of the drawing appears to stir a vat of molasses.

Kara Walker made this watercolor in the wake of A Subtlety (2014), her monumental installation in a former sugar refinery in Brooklyn, New York. Throughout its duration, A Subtlety served as a site that examined the fraught history of sugar production and honored the Caribbean slaves who fed the desire for sugar in all its forms. These watercolors are similarly discomfiting, prompting the viewer to consider how the dark histories of human behavior continue to inform the present.