Kara Walker Is No One’s Robot

The raised right arm of a 7-foot-tall Black automaton in a somber Victorian dress came swinging down toward an approaching visitor, who had unknowingly triggered a motion sensor.

“Oh, watch your head!” the artist Kara Walker called out. She was standing just outside the wingspan of her creation, called Fortuna, as it sputtered to life in a cavernous hangar at the Brooklyn Navy Yard this spring. The robot, named for a prophetess,began to spit out printed fortunes from its mouth; they fluttered to the floor for the audience to contemplate.

“The paradox of Being Black is the condition of Not-being,” one read.

“Your last shred of dignity is often your best.”

“Loss is aheady thing our hearts cannot comprehend.”

Fortuna is one of eight robots Walker produced in a groundbreaking collaboration merging art and technology for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The kinetic ensemble begins its marathon performance on July 1 in the museum’s free, first-floor gallery and runs for almost two years.

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Walker and her team of engineers, fabricators and designers were in the throes of staging and testing the weathered-looking figures. The artist’s commission bears one of her poetically complex titles: “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.”

Kara Walker’s “Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with an ensemble of seven automatons enacting a mix of chants and choreographed movements.Credit…Marissa Leshnov for The New York Times