“A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” by the California artist Kara Walker is a conceptual installation from 2014 that mediates on race, gender, and sexuality. It was opened to the public the same year that the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining national recognition after the death of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
The project features a statue resembling the Sphinx, except the face has been replaced by stereotypically African-American female characteristics such as full lips, a wide nose, and a bonnet. It is constructed entirely out of sugar, a product whose cultivation historically depended on the labor of enslaved Africans.
The most interesting aspect for me is the juxtaposition between the achievements of Ancient Egyptians and the treatment of African-Americans in the U.S. European justified slavery through the rhetoric of the “white man’s burden.” However, this statue illustrates how misguided it is to see Africans as “barbaric” or “uncivilized” by recalling the heights of creativity and artistic powers that the Ancient Egyptians reached before colonization.
