Keys to the Coop is a luridly shocking depiction of a young, black girl about to bite into the neck and head of a decapitated chicken. The stark, black-and-white contrast of the monumental linocut evokes the life-sized, cut-paper silhouette installations for which Kara Walker attracted critical attention in 1995. Although born in California, at thirteen Walker moved to Georgia with her family and later attended the Atlanta College of Art. She continued her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, where she lives and works.

An eighteenth-century French invention, black-paper silhouettes became increasingly prevalent in the nineteenth century, particularly as a way to limn profile portraits and portray sentimental scenes. Walker has found the technique appealing in part because of its associations with a decorous and popular pictorial mode. As she has explained, “I want accessibility, something that is easily read and could operate on some innocuous level to engage people––then I could pull the rug out from under them.” 30 Keys to the Coop is just such a discomfiting image. About to taste her prey, which she holds in one hand, a girl nonchalantly twirls and flaunts a large key in the other. She has not only managed to feed herself, but has done so by securing access to the coop, perhaps by a lucky accident, theft, or some other means.

Regardless of her method, she has succeeded in satisfying her hunger and attaining a measure of control over her life. Walker portrayed her subject as bestial: the girl approaches her prey ferociously; and girl and fowl, although clearly distinct, are nevertheless conjoined by similarly restless, animated contours, and analogous poses.

Walker’s use of stereotype––she portrays the protagonist as a “savage animal,” an association whites have traditionally used to denigrate and oppress African Americans––here and elsewhere has concerned a number of people who feel that , among other things, her work too unreservedly embraces attitudes which generations of blacks and whites have struggled to overcome. 31 Walker’s defenders applaud her head-on confrontation of such constructs. In effect, her antiheroine also possesses the force and acuity necessary to secure the key, an emblem of freedom and accomplishment. As Walker has provocatively suggested, “I think of my art as a kind of melodrama, producing a certain giddiness that entertains but also empowers.” 32 (DAN)