There is a paradox at the heart of Kara Walker's art.
In her monumental drawings, hulking public sculptures and finely cut black paper silhouettes, the prolific African American artist animates (sometimes literally) the visual artefacts of slavery: racist, one-dimensional caricatures drawn from the white imaginary.
Her work is alive with the ghosts of the Antebellum period of American history, before the Civil War cleaved the fragile Union in two — between the generally liberal, abolitionist North and the slave-owning, Confederate South.
