In artworks exploring unequal power dynamics across a wide swath of history, Kara Walker has long called attention to the most inhuman tendencies of people. Now, in a new installation in the country’s tech capital, she is highlighting the superhuman capabilities of A.I. as only she can.
The riveting, kinetic “Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through spring 2026 presents us with a display of mechanized figures whose movements, powered by technologies new and old, send us back to the future — that is, to the histories of domination and control that underpin all of Walker’s art, and from which advances such as ChatGPT and the iPhone 16 seem unlikely to liberate us.
At the same time, “Fortuna” (for short) — an artwork conceived during the onset of the pandemic, when Walker herself was ill and grieving the loss of her father — offers up the promise of personal and collective healing. Walker’s automatons enact stubbornly human rituals that run the gamut from baptisms to the self-soothing of a child holding a doll, and they do so while standing atop fragments of obsidian (a volcanic glass believed in mystical circles to have trauma-absorbing properties).
If these stances feel difficult to reconcile, that’s the point — and it will be a familiar one to admirers of Walker’s big public artworks, starting a decade ago with the majestic sphinx-shaped confection known as “Sugar Baby” and continuing through the large-scale fountain she exhibited in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2019 as an allegory of the Black Atlantic modeled on London’s Victoria Memorial.
These were works that resurfaced problematic images and antiquated art forms in the hope of generating new ones, and that asked us to sit with conflict and discomfort and see what develops. So is “Fortuna,” which like Walker’s previous installations has an extended, carnivalesque title: “Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) / A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. / Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners / Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious / by Kara E-Walker.”
Comparing “Fortuna” to Walker’s earlier big commissions, however, reveals an evolution in her approach to public art — as well as our own. “Sugar Baby,” a kind of monument to the unsung workers of the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, was, in my recollection, one of the first large public sculptures to have a similarly outsized presence on social media. “Fortuna” takes a decidedly un-monumental turn, with figures that are only slightly larger than life-size, and in doing so captures something of the way in which A.I. and other new technologies are increasingly baked into our bodily experience.
Intertwining the digital and the handmade, techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, illness and recovery, and — most profoundly — the histories of slavery and robotics, “Fortuna” demands much more of us than many other “interactive” installations. Up on SFMOMA’s sixth floor, visitors queue to be allotted their couple of minutes inside Yayoi Kusama’s peppy room of suspended polka dots. They will need more time and, certainly, more emotional bandwidth to experience Walker’s piece, with its stop-and-start performances and halting transfigurations, which is on view in the museum’s ground-floor Roberts Family Gallery and can be entered directly from the street without paying admission.
Some of Walker’s references in “Fortuna” are types of mass entertainment that might not seem particularly complex: arcade games, natural history dioramas, and the kid-centered restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese, to name a few. Walker was born and partly raised in Stockton, Calif., and her memories of visits to San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique and the California Academy of Sciences inform the installation.
The fortunetelling automaton that is the project’s namesake looms over visitors, rotating and gesticulating ominously before eventually releasing from its mouth a slip of paper with a printed fortune. (Mine read “Perhaps you are unique”; others scattered around the base of the figure proclaimed “The Cyborg Savior! Rise Up!” and “Prayers are blind.”) Walker composed some 100 of these teasing bits of verbiage, initially using ChatGPT but eventually writing them herself when the A.I. did not meet her expectations.
In a soon-to-be-published interview with SFMOMA’s curator and head of contemporary art Eungie Joo, who organized the exhibition, Walker talks about the ways in which large public art commissions can feel distanced from the artist’s hand. “You never need to touch a block of marble to become a monument maker,” she says.
In “Fortuna,” the hand is everywhere — in the automatons’ expressive faces (initially modeled in clay before being scanned and 3-D-printed), in their steampunk-like costumes created by the couturier Gary Graham, and even in a callback to Walker’s early silhouettes (look outside the gallery’s large plate-glass windows onto the Howard Street alleyway, and you’ll see that the figures cast shadows on the wall of a neighboring building).
Even in the computerized choreography of the automatons, there is a sense of the artist wresting back control from the machine. Walker collaborated with the technical lead Noah Feehan in an elaborate, back-and-forth process involving both software programmed by Feehan and Walker’s manipulation of colored paper cutouts on a foamcore board. The result appears both random and schematic; some of the dolls’ individual movements may repeat during a typical visit, but their interactions with each other don’t exactly. In the rare moments when they seem to synchronize, there is a jam-session vibe reminiscent of Ragnar Kjartansson’s multichannel video installation “The Visitors,” up on the museum’s sixth floor.
Walker has given the robots names, which correspond to their ritualistic sounds and gestures. Harpy plucks the strings of an instrument set into her stomach; the Belltoller sounds a chime with a knock of his fist; the Whisperer confers with her doll; and the Waterbearer balances an imaginary burden on her shoulders. Central to the action are the Levitator and the Magician, who enact and re-enact a shaky, flailing resurrection more haunting than their names would suggest.
“My automatons reference an eternally retrospective blackness — archetypes, rather than stereotypes,” Walker says in her interview with Joo. “They don’t resemble the model of robust superhuman robots that the industry has long promised or threatened us with.”
Two stand apart from the main display: the prognosticating Fortuna, spitting out her cryptic bits of content, and the abject Dover, whose doubled-over figure evokes addiction with a shocking specificity. His presence, and his position by a street-facing window, suggest that Walker is addressing current-day San Francisco as well as more far-reaching histories and geographies of innovation and subordination.
Like Fortuna, perhaps, Walker is also speaking to the future. Although her installation borrows from the arcade games and other cheap thrills of the last century or two, it has a key textual source in Octavia E. Butler’s speculative novel “Parable of the Sower.” Published in 1993 but set in 2024-27, the dystopian tale follows a Black Californian teenager’s struggle to endure and form community in the wreckage of climate change, authoritarianism and socioeconomic crisis.
Walker’s vision of the not-too-distant future is more ambiguous, and ultimately as confounding as Fortuna’s. But to judge from this powerful new work, she has faith in the persistence of the human species — and, along with it, the “Human Specious.”
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