You walk into a pristine white-cube gallery expecting polite Victorian paper silhouettes, the kind you might find in a 19th-century nursery scrapbook. You step closer and the illusion shatters: those delicate cutouts depict slavery, sexual violence, and unspeakable historical trauma. That bait-and-switch is the signature move of Kara Walker. This episode is a deep dive into the contemporary American artist who weaponized two of the most innocent-looking materials in art history (silhouettes and sugar) and turned them into mirrors America cannot look away from.

We trace her formative culture shock moving from California to Stone Mountain, Georgia, her time at the Atlanta College of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, and her 1994 breakout at the Drawing Center with Gone, an Antebellum tale that detonated the New York scene and  ...