by Jesse Slater // Dec. 5, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Ghosts.
“Freedom Forever USA” read the postage stamps, applied like bandaids to affix vast sheets of paper together. The sheets make up a monumental collage by Kara Walker, presented alone on the far wall of Sprüth Magers’ Berlin gallery. Her signature cut-out silhouettes imposed across the creased surface present a brutal scene. Against the backdrop of a blasted-out building, bodies cling to or hang from poles. The image recalls public lynchings used to terrorize Black people across the United States. In the foreground, a child plays with a stick and hoop, rolling it through the rubble, continuing despite the devastation around them. The revolving hoop reminds me of cycles repeating, and the debris each repetition carries forward.
Kara Walker: ‘Kara Elizabeth Walker presents Dispatches from A—and the Museum of Half-remembered Histories,’ 2025, installation view at Sprüth Magers, Berlin // Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers, photo by Timo Ohler
This work is just one of the large-scale collages included in the exhibition ‘Kara Elizabeth Walker presents Dispatches from A— and the Museum of Half-remembered Histories.’ The collages are colossal, and as most of the works are hung salon-style filling up the walls, there is little room to catch your breath between Walker’s meticulous scenes. It does give the effect of being in a museum rather than a white cube gallery space. And there is much to take in. Walker fills the deathly, spectral gaps in the “Half-remembered Histories” that make up the story of the US, and does so unflinchingly.
The collage’s figures appear to be life-sized, only levitating in the elevated yet distanced position of the gallery wall. The scenes they make up vary between being direct, pictorial compositions, presented neatly as if on a stage, and chaoses of limbs, outstretched arms and profiles of faces in anguish or quiet withdrawal. Many bear symbols associated with white supremacy in the US, from the pilgrim hats worn by English Puritans settling and colonizing North America, to Ku Klux Klan hoods. Hunters aim guns near children. The outlines of lifeless bodies are cut from swathes of choppy blue water, a reminder of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It’s confronting to stand in the space, to see so many representations of racial violence stacked together.
Kara Walker: ‘The Mountaintop,’ 2025, watercolor and sumi-e ink on cut paper on paper, 199.4 × 331.5 cm, 208 × 340.5 cm (framed) // © Kara Walker, courtesy Sprüth Magers, photo by Timo Ohler
Beyond historical imagery, the works’ titles point to specific histories Walker redresses. ‘Tituba’s Handmaidens’ names the enslaved Native American woman who was among the first to be accused during the Salem witch trials, an often whitewashed event in US history. Bodies and limbs are cut out in blood red. Arms seem to point and gesticulate, assigning blame. The collage ‘Massacre on Juneteenth’ references the Tulsa race massacre, where a white supremacist mob attacked the affluent Black Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Taking place a few weeks before Juneteenth in the year 1921, the mob killed between 36 and 300 people, depending on who is estimating, and left around 10,000 Black people homeless. In Walker’s collage, Black figures tip their hats in the distance; kids run towards each other, arms outstretched, their braids flying behind them. Someone wearing the billowing costume of a court jester picks a slingshot from the back pocket of a small boy in a pilgrim collar. The collage remembers the massacre, as well as historicizes the prosperous Black neighborhood that existed before it.
Kara Walker: ‘Kara Elizabeth Walker presents Dispatches from A—and the Museum of Half-remembered Histories,’ 2025, installation view at Sprüth Magers, Berlin // Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers, photo by Timo Ohler
I reference the titles of the works, though they aren’t on view in the gallery space. Presented without an anchor to their context, the collages vaporize the illusion that their contents are a thing of the past, relegated to history books. The scenes have the feeling of being omnipresent, instead, or at least stuck in that cycle of repeating. The one line of text that does make its way into the space is pencilled across the bottom of an ink drawing in the first room of the gallery. “THE DAY YOU REALIZED THEY NEVER STOPPED HATING YOU” captions an image of a split figure being simultaneously shackled at the ankle and hand-cuffed at the wrist. We’re reminded of that historical persistence; slavery finding new forms in mass incarceration and forced prison labor.
Another thread of US history comes through in a collage bearing the profiles of US presidents. I don’t recognize them all, but that feels like part of the point. Cut from paper covered in black ink, the profiles look homogenous really, tessellating together in a heap. Some of the faces are presented with open mouths, whispering in the ear of the next head. I think about secret societies and members-only clubs. Beside the collage, an ink drawing presents a white swan, with the heads of Black people lying around it. The drawing is titled ‘Great White.’
Kara Walker: ‘Kara Elizabeth Walker presents Dispatches from A—and the Museum of Half-remembered Histories,’ 2025, installation view at Sprüth Magers, Berlin // Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers, photo by Timo Ohler
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Walker recycles the compositions and imagery of the Western art canon for the sake of exposing its bias. The collage ‘Cypher for the New Republick’ centers on a kneeling figure with four arms cycling round its torso. A Klansman dominates from above, wearing a KKK hood in the style of Philip Guston’s paintings. Guston considered his hooded figures self-portraits, and their canonization speaks volumes about who art history is written to recognize, and who it overlooks. Among the collages, Walker also presents vanitas-style pastel still lifes, borrowing the genre’s reflection on the transience of life. Only, dismembered heads and limbs of Black people lie nestled among the fruit and vegetables.
Kara Walker: ‘Cypher for the New Republick,’ 2025, watercolor and sumi-e ink on cut paper on paper 199.4 × 192.1 cm | 208 × 200.5 cm (framed) // © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sprüth Magers, photo by Timo Ohler
Returning to the first piece, hanging alone on the far wall, I think about what image of nationhood the “Freedom Forever USA” postage stamps are trying to uphold. Walker’s redressed “Half-remembered Histories” update the stamp’s national mythology. The effect–tracing the reign of white power all the way back to the country’s colonial founding. What is “Forever USA”? The inherited wounds of racial violence that haunt the present as they persist.
Exhibition Info
Sprüth Magers
Kara Walker: ‘Kara Elizabeth Walker presents Dispatches from A—and the Museum of Half-remembered Histories’
Exhibition: Nov. 14, 2025–Apr. 4, 2026
spruethmagers.com
Oranienburger Straße 18, 10178 Berlin, click here for map
