Ericka Walker

Walker is noted for using traditional and digital printmaking tools and techniques[2] to design and print large-scale contemporary lithographs that emulate turn of the century propaganda posters.

In his juror's statement for the Southern Printmaking Biennale V exhibition catalog, Matthew Rebholz asserted that her work reflects contentious U.S. foreign policy issues and the implications of endless occupation,[3] while other critics have pointed to Walker's use of nostalgia as a means of questioning persistent domestic relationships between industry, agriculture, and mechanized warfare.

"[7] Reviewing a three-person exhibition that included Walker's lithographs at the Vernon Public Art Gallery in 2015, essayist Carolyn MacHardy states that "Walker's works simulate propaganda but they are not propaganda: it is difficult to identify the authority behind the work and it is not always clear what type of action the viewer is being goaded into.

"[8] In her own artist statement Walker is quoted as saying that "[The work] points critically to both the violent and the bucolic - the guns and wars and tractors and engines of industry, and the language of national pride grafted to principles of duty, sacrifice, and honor - that have long been and remain its allies and infrastructure.

"[9] Oversimplified directives and bold imagery - traditional tactics of visual propagandists meant to elicit automatic emotional allegiance to agitation or integration activities[10] - are in Walker's work pitted against themselves to reveal a complex web of self-generated mythologies that continue to define contemporary visual articulations of labor, national pride, patriarchy, and patriotism.