The Artist’s Channel

”Contrary to most thought on such matters, no one is given a particular amount of talent that must then be used. Talent does not come in quantities. Instead people have varying abilities to use any of an infinite number of channels, any one of which in your terms leads to an inexhaustible source. The channels by their nature will translate and shape creative energy with their own unique dimensions. You are not given 800 or 5,000 milligrams of talent. You are given your own nature, certain portions of it naturally tuning in to what in your case you would call the channel of art. You sense it’s great dimensions, the richness of its complexity. You are particularly attuned to it.

You have only to be open and receptive..”

Personal Sessions vol 1,page 216


Visual Arts Professor Kara Walker Wins Smithsonian Award

”The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced recently that Columbia professor Kara Walker won its annual Lucelia Artist Award, which is given to a leading contemporary American artist younger than 50. The prestigious award, created in 2001 and funded by the New York-based Lucelia Foundation, has a $25,000 honorarium. Walker, an associate professor of visual arts at Columbia's School of the Arts, expressed her gratitude for the award by saying, "It'll be a great help for my studio practice."

Walker is best known for her large-scale silhouettes through which she examines slavery, race and the old South. Her provocative work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art , the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1997, she received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

" Walker has already influenced a generation of artists and produced an impressive body of challenging work in a relatively short career," the Lucelia jurors wrote in their statement”.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/04/05/karaWalker.html