"Quiet As It's Kept"

See the exhibition label to learn more

Françoise Mouly: Hi, my name is Françoise Mouly, and I am the art editor of The New Yorker. You are looking at some preliminary drawings and the covers that Kara Walker did at the time of Toni Morrison’s death. The way this came about is, I had already worked with Kara, and I reached out to her. She was just coming back from a trip overseas in London, and she heard about the news that morning.

She hadn’t slept. She agreed to work for what was a very tight deadline. We had, like, barely 24 hours or 48 hours before we could turn the cover around. And she went into a period of intense, creative energy finding, searching for, how to represent a person that was—also that was really important to her, that she cared for immensely, and who was known for her words.

So, Kara went into sculpting a head and doing a number of different drawings. New Yorker covers do not have any cover line. There wasn’t going to be any title explaining that it would be Toni Morrison. So Kara focused on the resemblance to make sure that the readers would see who it was, and also a very iconic head of hair, which she turned into speech balloons—because this is someone who made her mark in the world through her words.