The Pool Party of Sardanapalus (after Delacroix, Kienholz), 2017

Walker’s The Pool Party of Sardanapalus (after Delacroix, Kienholz) uses the visual language of political cartoons but occupies the scale and ambition of 19th-century history painting. Its title and composition refer to French artist Eugène Delacroix’s massive 1827 painting The Death of Sardanapalus, which depicts a vanquished king who watches as his “possessions”—slaves, wives, horses, and treasures—are raped and plundered by his enemies. Walker, like Delacroix, presents a scene of diabolical destruction. The central triangular shape of Walker’s composition is formed by the lines of three ropes tethered to the foot of a white man, who is stripped naked, eviscerated, and pulled in three directions by three young black women in bathing suits. The group pointedly recalls a notorious 2015 incident in which a white police officer tackled and handcuffed an unarmed black teenage girl attending a private pool party in McKinney, Texas, and then drew his handgun on fellow partygoers (likewise unarmed); a grand jury declined to indict the officer involved. Walker’s roiling composition—whose characters belong to disparate historical periods (antebellum to the present day)—is punctuated by other moments of racial violence, cruelty, and suffering, as if to emphasize the persistence of violence perpetrated against black Americans from the era of slavery to police brutality in the 21st century.