Inspired by a wide range of sources, from antique dolls to Bunraku puppetry to Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, Kara E. Walker’s Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) addresses the memorialization of trauma, the objectives of technology, and the possibilities of transforming the negative energies that plague contemporary society. In the work, commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, automatons trapped in a never-ending cycle of ritual and struggle are repositories of the human soul. They recall mechanized medieval icons that evidenced divinity, vitality, and the promise of faith. Situated within an energetically charged field of black obsidian from California’s Mt. Konocti — a volcanic glass with deep spiritual properties — Walker’s Gardeners evoke wonder, reflection, respite and hope. Just past this vignette, the installation’s namesake, Fortuna, responds to each visitor with a choreographed gesture and a printed fortune fresh from her mouth.

Walker’s multi-part, interactive commission was unveiled at SFMOMA on July 1, 2024 and is on view through spring 2026. The installation was produced in collaboration with technical lead Noah Feehan, design and engineering studio Hypersonic, couturier Gary Graham, and fabrication company New Project.

Kara Walker has long been recognized for her incisive examinations of the dynamics of power and the exploitation of race and sexuality. She uses fantasy and humor in her work to confront troubling histories and dominant narratives, taking back control in the process.

Born in 1969 in Stockton in California’s Central Valley, Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigations of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures. She has received many awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997. She became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. Her major survey exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love was organized by The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and opened there in February 2007 before traveling to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.

In spring 2014, Walker’s first large-scale public project, A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was on view at the abandoned Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Commissioned and presented by Creative Time, the massive, sugar-covered, sphinx-like sculpture responded to the troubled history of sugar and reclaimed its site with a marker of self-possession. Other commissions include The Katastwóf Karavan, a steam-powered calliope wrapped in silhouetted tableaus depicting scenes of dehumanizing violence. First presented at Prospect.4 in New Orleans in 2017, Walker’s steam organ emits a wail that conjures the ghosts of thousands of enslaved humans held in pens as they awaited the auction block. In 2019, when Walker was selected for the Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern, she responded with a four-tiered fountain, Fons Americanus, that alluded to the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace. She described it as a “counter-memorial,” a gift “to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world.”

Walker’s work can be found in numerous museums and public collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI) in Rome. She lives and works in New York.

Q&A WITH THE ARTIST

Kara Walker was interviewed for the exhibition in 2024 by Eungie Joo, then head curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Reprinted by permission.

EUNGIE JOO We started talking about the possibility of doing something at SFMOMA in 2018, and you came out for your first site visit before the pandemic. Can you share a little about the inception of this new work?

KARA WALKER In the early stages of working on this commission, I was thinking about past large-­scale works of mine and the realization that monuments are largely about death. As this project was taking shape, it was resembling an ancient necropolis, or I was approaching ideas around immortality. A big reason was that we were in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and that, along with my health and the health of my loved ones, was on my mind— the realities of death, confusion around mass loss of life, and the human, maybe slightly delusional desire to make it go away, or to transform that death into something resembling everlasting life.

EJ You’ve talked a lot about automation, AI, antiquated robots, and the body and technology. I was wondering why this aspect of technology came into play at this time.

“I got to thinking about the love/hate relationship we are developing with tech. It’s as though our bodies are now the necessary extensions and it’s the devices that actually want to be communicating to each other. Ours is the flesh that can make that happen.”

KW It comes back again to the pandemic and illness and my own vulnerability, the vulnerability of people I love, and our necessary reliance on tech to keep us in contact, and its importance to maintain the essence of community. We could talk or FaceTime with one another, we could order all the food we needed and have it delivered. I made this one fast drawing that alludes to this. It’s a grotesque self-­ portrait, eyeballs bulging out of their sockets, holding an iPad, glued completely to this one outlet from isolation and quarantine.
And that got me thinking about the love/hate relationship that we are developing with needing, wanting, and feeling somewhat addicted to tech. The reduction of my body into snippets and memes and hashtags got me thinking about the permeability of the body. And the downloading of new ideas or new material into the body. It’s as though our bodies are now the necessary extensions and it’s the devices that actually want to be communicating to each other. Ours is the flesh that can make that happen. We’re the necessary piece of technology that they don’t have in order to go.

EJ The battery.

KW Yes, we are the engine or the battery. And so I started looking very broadly at ideas about organ theft and transhumanism.

EJ How do we go from that to immortality?

KW There are new technology people out there, or at least there have been for the last few decades, who really think that tech will provide the way of extending life—and that somehow our lives are made up of code that can be hacked—life that can and should be saved. The transhumanist idea, I guess, is the latest incarnation of an almost utopian view on extending human life perhaps toward immortality. Why? Not for me to answer. I think you can already see that injustice and cruelty will not improve with longer lives, that the quest for immortality creates an elite who has access, which in turn necessitates an underclass that is expendable. That might not be new, but it came close to the reality experienced en masse during the pandemic. Who has access to what kind of healthcare, who’s expendable, who’s deemed essential? All those terms came into play.

EJ There are three components that make up the overall composition of Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), which are essentially three points of interaction.

KW In the whole space, there are three—let’s call them dioramas.

EJ They’re almost like vitrines without a case, right?

KW Exactly. The case would have been prohibitively expensive—like an aquarium or terrarium, really. So we have this large central display, which is modeled on the American Museum of Natural History’s elephant display here in New York. And two smaller display areas that contain a single figure each. As well as a wall-­mounted vitrine containing artifacts of the process of building the project. The central pedestal contains multiple figures enacting a mysterious rite, maybe a funeral, resurrection, baptism, dance—a ritual that viewers sort of witness. In this large vitrine, there are six figures, three of whom are positioned around a reclining figure who begins to levitate. One is Belltoller, who does just what his name says—the ringing of a single bell. His cohorts include Waterbearer; there’s the Kneeling Magician, who rises up and controls the movements of Levitator. Standing sentry on either end are Harpy, a doll-­like musical figure who has a stringed instrument embedded in her body, and Whisperer, a child with a doll of her own with whom she’s in private communication. On a separate pedestal that faces the street, Dover slumps as his fallen arms occasionally twitch with memory. Against the wall facing the central diorama stands Fortuna, the namesake of this project. I was particularly drawn to carnival fortune-­telling machines and automatons. I think the question at the heart of this work is “What is to become of us?” And although Fortuna does provide fortunes on little slips of paper for the public to take away, the question is never expressly stated, therefore her “answers” run the gamut from further questions to punchlines, non sequiturs, and phrases in the prophetic perfect tense.  

EJ When looking at some of your preparatory drawings and some modeling for those figures, the first thing that came to mind was a sort of biblical scene, like something with the Christ child even. Not that this is being replicated, but this kind of grouping in the center recalls a revivalist moment because this Levitator is actually convulsing and seemingly experiencing a kind of— it could be ecstasy or agony.

KW Exactly. All those things. Some of the reference points that I was looking at were coming straight out of documentary photography of baptisms in the American South at the turn of the last century. That’s the look of the characters and their costumes to some extent, although that has shifted somewhat over time. The central levitating figure was originally a figure of abjection crawling and very low to the ground, but that wasn’t working mechanically, so I opted to thrust her aloft and let gravity be her foil. 

EJ It’s interesting that you liken it to abjection, because when I say that it is experiencing agony or ecstasy—and maybe it will remain undefined, but at this stage, it is gray—the figure is vulnerable because it is on its back. I think that her lot is hard to decipher, whereas if she were crawling, somehow that would be fixed as a more desperate gesture.

KW I think that was really getting to me, because it was etched in my mind that I had to have this sort of image of suffering. But that doesn’t really work for me in my practice because it doesn’t lend itself to further thought for myself or for a viewer. Suffering is suffering, and you don’t get to pull back and say other things. You just know that it hurts.

EJ That is super interesting in reference to ideas around suffering or around racialized oppression as it surfaces in your work, that there is always a potentially personal, emotional, physical quest, but there is also the possibility of philosophical questioning. In a lot of the communication with your studio team, the puppets or the figures in this new sculpture are referred to as dolls, and I’d like to talk a little about what they are—that they are robots, they are dolls, they are puppets . . .

KW Automatons.

EJ They are automatons, but there are also all these other aspects of work you have made in the past. They are also figures that you have drawn in the past. They seem to be recurring characters in a way. To me, all of this plus your working hand reminds me of the very first show of yours I saw, at Wooster Gardens in 1995. And you had this cutout cardboard puppet—it was big.

KW It was pretty big. There were two, or I know that I made two. I think the one you’re remembering was a threesome, and you could pull a tab and they would rock back and forth, suggestively. Yes, the puppet-­action movement thing has been a part of my work pretty much from the beginning. Doing the cutouts lent itself to animated shadow puppetry, which was unexpected enough in the contemporary art context. I did the films with the cut-paper puppets, but those early moving wall cutouts I sort of abandoned. I just did them and walked away quietly.

EJ I always remember the large puppet in your first show. I was surprised by the scale, because your work wasn’t quite at that scale for everything yet. But the puppet was quite big. Maybe not human size, but three-­quarters or two-­thirds or something like that. It had this reference to a full-­scale puppet. Then for many years you worked with these small puppets that you could manipulate with your hands. For the 2005 REDCAT exhibition you did an incredible series of puppet show performances. And of course you were making the films quite actively in those days. That scale had a relationship to the things you did on the wall, taking them back in the films and the live per-formance to control another gesture of storytelling. The last time I came here to the studio, I was surprised to see the sculpting you are doing to create your figures, and the sewing, and all the experiments. Not sketching to think or work out a thought, but really—

KW —hands-­on materials-­based.

EJ I have been seeing very practical, technical things alongside imaginary things, let’s say.

KW I challenged myself to try a material experience of thinking with the puppets and the sewing, and eventually with clay, plaster, and 3-­D modeling. 

EJ I think with your previous projects that are of similarly grand scale, they were conceived differently, separate from your studio work. But this commission has a lot of return to the studio, back and forth, in and out of the studio.

KW It has been a learning process with these big projects. With each iteration of a large public commission—I’ve only made four now—I’ve tried to reclaim more of my hand, more of a connection between something that is handmade and an object that is fabricated or manufactured, so that it retains some—I was going to say “authenticity,” but it’s really Pleasure, because I like making art and it feels totally debilitating to just outsource it. Even though tech makes it a thousand times easier to do just that. You never need to touch a block of marble to become a monument maker. I don’t really like doing public works, to be frank, because each time a project necessarily metastasizes from an idea to an event, which is meant to function in specific ways for the institution. I become a “Job Producer” in a very political sense, and an en- tire ecosystem of art production is deployed to make it happen. I’m afraid the intent of the work has the potential to get muddled when there are too many disparate players manufacturing parts.

EJ But here we are talking about the implication of robotics and technology.

KW Technology, artificial intelligence, and actual intelligence.

EJ And that sends us into discussions of the racialization of intelligence around technology—so-­called technology and intelligence—how the information being fed to these automatons is corrupt information, information that we don’t necessarily believe in the first place. That’s the knowledge that they’re calling upon.

KW Yes. It’s very interesting. I’ve got ChatGPT and have been in conversation with it to try and generate fortunes for Fortuna, and it is very bad at it because it lacks soul or intuition, it hasn’t got a past or a sense of shame. It has just the information that it is able to glean from whatever you give it. That’s all it’s got. It has this very limited resource set. It can spit back an immense amount of information—but it becomes repetitive and dull because it lacks a soul, and it lacks the ability to be irreverent. You could tell it to be irreverent and it would bore you to tears with its recycled jokes. It doesn’t have a person that it is talking to. It has no fear. It lacks the ability to be worried for its life.

EJ But maybe its limitations force it out of your own brain a bit?

KW Yeah, exactly. I know what I’m looking for, but the thing that it does is force you to make better parameters to feed it.

EJ Basically, you used ChatGPT as a brainstorming device?

KW Kind of. I think it’s the best it can do right now. It’s a sounding board: “Oh, do you mean this?” And I’m like, “No.” “Oh, do you mean that?” “Closer.” Then after a while I was like, “I’m tired of talking to you, so I’m just going to go and do this on my own.”

EJ One thing I thought we could go into is the vitrine diorama structure in relation to institutional display and how that figures into some kind of return to or reconsideration of history and its telling.

KW I was thinking about the Natural History Museum, my love of the California Academy of Sci- ences. Most natural history museums—what we think of today—begin with a nineteenth-­century model of taxonomical arrays of animals and peoples and minerals that our earth is made of. And I wanted to borrow that language and propose a Future / Present scenario whereby as viewers we wonder what era we are in and that throws us into an anachronistic fugue. My automatons reference an eternally retrospective Blackness— archetypes, rather than stereotypes. Their fantastical costuming contains signifiers of oppression and destruction and mortality. They don’t resemble the model of robust superhuman robots that the industry has long promised or threatened us with. Therein comes the question of the ethics of robotics and what they want robots to do, and how different is that from slavery? Creating nonhuman persons to abuse, an underclass to do the bidding, to do the work.

EJ You mentioned the California Academy of Sciences, and with this new project, it is fascinating to think about the importance of the location, of the Bay Area. As long as we have known each other, we have discussed this shared relationship to the Bay Area. You were raised there until you were in your mid-­teens, and I arrived in my mid-­teens. So we have had that shared experience, and I think we have always felt that we could have known each other in our early lives.

KW For sure.

EJ One thing that comes to mind in terms of wonder, or in terms of experience, is what museums meant to us; what our experiences in these institutions of culture and history meant to us, because they meant something to us from the beginning. When I think about those kinds of places and our eager participation, which was always kept at a distance, I see that scale of also being small or young in relation to the tools of storytelling or the tools of the institution. I see this evidenced in this project. There are many moments that speak to the acquisition of knowledge that we experienced. That’s also why it’s interesting how the institutional framework and vocabulary are coming into play in the work.

KW My relationship to California is primary; I really had a kind of California fundamentalist education almost. I remember my eighth-­ grade history teacher (in Stockton) was going on about how important California is to the nation and the world because of its agriculture and its industry and economy, and the diversity of the state with its progressive attitudes. I was very proud of California for that. California is the state that was traditionally at the forefront, the avant-­ garde in many national trends. And so it’s been frightening to see a place like San Francisco and Silicon Valley innovating us into a technological dystopia along the lines of every fictional scenario that Hollywood has produced. Why are the morality tales not serving? Or what is the tale that is to be told? In a lot of the narrative versions, there’s a protagonist who is positioned against the machine, say, but we don’t know who the protagonist is anymore in the scenario that we find ourselves in. 

EJ If you think about California as this promised land of some sort, the narrative of course is about opportunity. That works really well with families from the American South who had this second migration during World War II, when so many opportunities existed for people who had come from the southern United States to the West Coast and from southern Mexico to northern Mexico (which is California), as well as immigrants from Asia. It’s a meeting point that has no match anywhere else. People traveled all the way across the continent from these different directions and from the sea, and they arrived in California. There’s something about the potential and the anachronisms that conflate into maybe less certainty, and therefore more possibility. And this is why I think it continues to feel like a possibility, even when it has never really exemplified possibility. Yes, there’s all this diversity, but that was dependent on coolie labor. That’s secondary slavery—the great migration escaping sharecropping into a different system, which also exploited its labor. So there is no positive grand narrative. A key component of the installation we have not yet discussed is the obsidian field.

KW On one of our site visits, we went up to Obsidian vineyards for a picnic, and I was fascinated with the material, so I took a few pieces home, and looking at the obsidian, I thought, “What would it be like to use this as some kind of energy field?” It’s black and it’s natural and it addresses something about place. I was thinking about the Central Valley where I grew up and the idea of the geological forces at work making valleys. A few things happened at once. I was thinking about the obsidian and wondering what the possibility would be of even getting it, so I reached out to ask about acquiring a large quantity, enough to fill the gallery. Then I saw the Black Dolls exhibition at the New York Historical Society and began thinking about dolls. Beautiful care-­worn antique dolls made of scraps and love. And by the end of the year, when I was ill with COVID, as I said, it all sort of came together. Thinking about these bodies of ours, and vulnerability and isolation and that memory of being a kid home sick with my doll—I mean, how important that figure is for humans, the ubiquity of the doll or stuffed toy, the nonhuman pet or the inanimate confidante. I realized the same can be said of memorial sculpture, that it acts as a container for human sentiment and fear of the unknown. Okay, let’s have that be the rule, the figures will do a service for the public. Let’s say in the same way that we’re going to ask the obsidian to also be a grounding space. The obsidian has healing properties in mystical circles and works to offset trauma, among other things. This is kind of a different way of working for me because it feels like I’m working from the material outward. The obsidian providing an essential magical force and the “dolls” receiving our essential magical forces in return. 

EJ To me, in another way it’s consistent, but maybe just realized slightly differently. It is consistent if you think of A Subtlety, because sugar was your material because of its relevance to that space. And I think in this case, the field of obsidian, in a way, was nurtured by a physical experience you had of going to the north and then encountering this material that’s under the ground. It’s peeking up from under the ground, but it’s under the ground. It is the evidence of geologic time; it’s there and always has been there, but we didn’t see it. And it’s black. And it’s glistening. And it was liquid. It was moving. It was alive. And now, it’s stopped. That to me is time. The work is drawing a parallel between the formation of the obsidian field and what we experienced in terms of the stoppage of time under COVID— it’s kind of logical as a departure point because of your long engagement with historical time, trying to understand the present through a relatively recent historical moment of the last five hundred years. So now you’re looking at the last five thousand years. Or five thousand years for the context of the past five hundred years. But then also the context of innovation. You’re thinking about robots and AI, but you’re thinking about them from the eighteenth century.

KW Every piece of obsidian has a surface reminiscent of our black phone screens. But unlike the phones, the volcanic glass is “smart” in an intangible sense. You have to believe it, feel it. It doesn’t need to convince you.

EJ In a way, it’s like a clean palette and a full palette because it’s the black hole, the absence of all things or the presence of everything. It’s both. 

KW Both.

EJ And so I think the obsidian field starts to do that, too, in its reflections and refractions and sharpness. It’s a tool, but it’s a weapon. It’s dangerous to even interact with. I think all this could be a metaphor for Blackness. It’s something that is beautiful and prideful and lurking and dangerous and overdetermined and burdensome and all these contradictions. And that’s exactly where we get back to the presence of the viewer.

KW In order to make the piece have relevance for me, I have to fill it up, pack a small area densely with a bunch of ideas, and then reduce the idea to a digestible amount—because as a public piece, after all, it really has to be graspable, it has to make room for a viewer. So that means this work has a lot of seating, literal space to feel welcome. That’s my gift to you in a way. I don’t want to make an educational tool; the main problem to be solved in the museum is one of access and acceptance.

EJ It’s important, this way of making something have enough room to be interacted with, and then approachable so that people can feel they have the authority to have a judgment or a position or joy or laughter, whatever it is. That they are qualified. That is when public art has a very important role in relation to contemporary art, because we’ve kind of gotten ourselves into a bit of a hole where what we do is not perceived admirably as the diffusion of philosophy and letters but rather as elitist and exclusionary, which is exactly the opposite of our intention. We wanted to get into the museum and make it more accessible. Instead, we kind of ended up in a dead end or a cul-­de-­sac talking to each other. That’s why the idea of a semi-­permanent or long-­ term public artwork like you did at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, Prospect, in New Orleans, Turbine Hall in London—now for SFMOMA and later for MOCA5—these are such powerful gestures that can enliven contemporary art in relation to the public.

KW Maybe. Let’s see. I mean, the public is also entitled to hate it.

EJ Totally. But that position, to feel qualified to hate it, too, that still reflects an openness. Fortuna brings an interactive or prophetic element to the work; what does it mean to offer a potentially individualized message? People will walk up to the sculpture and the sculpture will offer them something.

KW I wanted there to be some kind of interaction in the spirit of the classic automaton carnival sideshow, and fortune-­ telling is one of the most recognizable actions. It just made the most sense, really. The way I initially proposed The Immortality Garden (Machine) was as a device to assuage survivors that could be a place to hold our grief, to hold the sadness of the public. I remember you asked how that was going to work, how people would input their feelings. I said, “By thinking them. By looking at and by thinking into the work.”

EJ The greatest AI input of them all: think.

KW Think and look. And then you’re having more realizations. 

EJ And think some more. 

KW And then it spits out a message. In the course of ChatGPT-ing my way into what a fortune is and what it means, I realized that it’s not really fortunes that are being outputted, but other types of language, sometimes mimicking the language of a fortune, but oftentimes not. And I think that the beauty of human intelligence is finding meaning and patterns in words and language. If I can give you words and language that are sometimes stream of consciousness, sometimes something more directed, sometimes a quote, sometimes a quote of my own—I think that’s a gift, to be able to sort of awaken that question mark, or maybe I didn’t even know I had a question for this statement that has come out, and what does this mean to me? It is literally a physical object, a piece of paper, and I don’t know about you, but I save all my fortunes from fortune cookies. 

EJ What they are really doing is confirming some inkling that you already have. That is what I thought of when I saw Fortuna. She is an affirmation in a way. Fortune is also affirmation. So when we talk about the suffering that people have gone through because of the pandemic and because of the violent recent past and present, then an affirmation of somebody’s humanity through fortune is also a very important gesture. 

KW I think it’s very important. And it’s also meant to be loving.

EJ That’s something that we talked about from the beginning: engagement and wonder and healing. I think that was one of the reasons we wanted to keep the obsidian field secret for now, because this gesture of beauty and grandeur of the obsidian field is also about the healing stone and a dispersal of negative energy.

KW Exactly.

EJ A cure.

KW A cure for what ails us, perhaps.

EJ So this is a loving gesture to the institution . . .

KW But also outward toward the street. 

EJ Totally. But also absolving some of the burden, which we cannot deny or negate. It just is. There are problems with the history of museums. There are problems with the history of class and race associated with these institutions, but we also have to find a way to transcend them.