On the occasion of Kara Walker's 2019 Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is proud to introduce a limited edition maquette of her monumental sculptural installation, "Fons Americanus". Directly alluding to the Victoria Memorial at Buckingham Palace, Walker’s sculpture stands as a “counter-memorial,” a playful yet incisive subversion of such monuments’ original public function within the context of European imperialist projects. Utilizing water as the foundational motif, Fons Americanus depicts a cadre of iconographic figures and scenes upon a multi-tiered platform, all interconnected through the flow of water and the legacies of the Black Atlantic: an Afro-Caribbean Venus, a team of historical sea-farers, and a tree with a hangman’s noose, in the same position as the scales of justice on the Victoria Memorial. Surrounded by two pools of water as a disaster at sea, Fons Americanus represents a counter-narrative to the Western pride of empire-building, a mythologized origin story founded upon the violent and tragic structures of our collective history.
