By Rebecca Walker

In the life I didn’t choose, I am a photographer and installation artist. I make
striking objects that live in a space beyond words. In the life I
chose, I write books about houses and people and feelings, but I reach
for my Yashica Mat camera to capture that which cannot be transcribed.
I photograph my son like Sally Mann captured her kids, running wild in
the nude. I try to photograph myself like Lorna Simpson would, in a
white dress, from behind, with one hand pouring water from a pewter
pitcher and the other pouring water from a plastic jug. I dream of
building a life-sized southern shack like the ones I used to pass on
the side of the road in Georgia, when I was a little girl, driving to
the family cemetery.

I’m no longer surprised when I open a box that’s been taped shut for
years, and find an artist’s monograph on top. A few books down, I’ll
find catalogs from shows that were up at MOMA when I was an intern. I
was sixteen then, sitting in front of Mark Rothko’s paintings for
hours. I’ve tried to give these books away, to sell them, anything to
keep from carrying them to another apartment, another country, but I
can’t. I need them. 

• Ana Mendieta: Earth Body

How to describe Ana Mendieta? She was a Cuban-American artist who made
kick-ass, sensual, outrageously smart and seductive work. I love the
Silueta series--Mendieta paints her body to blend into/become various
pieces of earth. She is a tree, a body of lava scorching the earth,
dirt in an open grave with flowers sprouting from her skin.

Her performance pieces are brave: she walks to the wall and slides her
bare hands down it, leaving two red smears. She stops, walks away, and
we’re looking: it’s a vagina, it’s a gash, it’s Ana’s mark on the art
world, her X in the history of art.

• Artwork by Shirin Neshat

When I came back to the states after living in a Muslim country, Shirin
Neshat’s work explained everything to me: the power of the feminine in
Islamic culture; the powerlessness of the feminine in Islamic culture.
The hopelessness of the idea of “Islamic culture.” The way faith and
art and desire come together to form something like a drug for the
human soul. Beloved, a photograph of mother and son, mother covered in
hijab, son held close to the breast, is heart stopping. The baby sits
in the folds of the hijab. And to the left of the mother and child, the
Muslim pieta, there is a gun.

• Seydou Keita

I don’t remember where I first saw Keita’s portraits, or heard about
the man who made photographs in a small studio in Bamako, Mali, for
decades before being “discovered” by Western collectors. I do know that
I wanted to buy his work the second I saw it. His work captures so much
about Africa and modernity and style and colonialism and independence
and youth and art and vibrancy, I can barely stand to talk about it. I
bought two large prints when I sold my first book. He died a few years
later.

• Yayoi Kusama: Love Forever

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama makes her art at a studio a few blocks
from the mental hospital in which she has lived, by choice, since the
early 1970s. “If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long
time ago,” Kusama has said, and I understand. Her work is feminine,
sprawling, heroic, psychedelic, minimalist, absurd and fecund. She
works in polka dots, giant nets and huge pumpkins. Yayoi visits
conventional reality, but doesn’t live there.

• The Art of Bill Viola

Man on fire. Man drenched in water. Man shifting through time, space
and the elements, on a thin video screen, with sound. A man comes in
and out of being before our very eyes. Genius. I love BV.

I could go on and on. Bill Eggleston, Gauguin, Paul Strand, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Seascapes! Odd shelf after odd shelf.