How Kara Walker Recasts Racism’s Bitter Legacy
The artist’s works turn the brutality of history inside out.
Editor’s Note: Read The Atlantic’s special coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.
, a white-supremacist rally in defense of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked a national conversation about Confederate monuments and, more broadly, about the ways in which the ugliest moments in American history are memorialized. Years was already capturing the traumas that extend from the era of slavery to the present day.
