O riginally cast in molasses as part of Kara Walker’s career-defining 2014 installation, African Boy Attendant Curio with Molasses and Brown Sugar, from “The Marvelous Sugar Baby” Installation at the old Domino Sugar Factory Warehouse. (Rear Basket) is a critical interrogation of the Caribbean slave trade which helped fuel the industrial gains of the 18th and 19th centuries. Walker’s expansive installation in an abandoned Domino Sugar Factory Warehouse in Brooklyn included a 35-foot tall sculpture of a sphinx covered in white sugar and surrounded by fifteen molasses-cast statues of young Black boys. In combination with the sphinx rendered in a “Mammy” caricature, the statues of Black boys, modeled after stereotypical racial tchotchkes and figurines, emphasize the exploitation of Black people as sites of labor and infantilization. As t.mes passed and the summer heat infiltrated the warehouse, the statues began to melt, spreading sugary liquid across the floor and further underscoring the erasure of Black individuals and their enslavement as a result of industrial sugar production.
One of these young boys is forever immortalized in the present work, cast in pigmented polyester resin which evokes the same rich hue of molasses. Working in the same vein as notable Black female sculptors Barbara Chase-Riboud and Simone Leigh, Walker's vision is similarly uncompromising and tells the stories of those who came before her. With one edition promised to the Brooklyn Museum, and three other editions from this series currently in the collects ion of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, African Boy Attendant Curio with Molasses and Brown Sugar, from “The Marvelous Sugar Baby” Installation at the old Domino Sugar Factory Warehouse. (Rear Basket) presents a rare opportunity to acquire a work of such esteem and importance from Walker’s extraordinarily powerful oeuvre.
