"YouDo" (detail): Kara Walker

I have seldom seen injustice presented so directly and so well as a subject of fine art. The work of Leon Golub comes to mind, whose extravagant visions of contemporary torture are so chilling, in part because they exhibit with beautiful painting the smiling indifference of the torturers. Gottfried Helnwein paints views of sadistic punishment with the care and precision of a latter-day Vermeer. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro photograph the Spanish Civil War with the emotional intensity of Goya. Goya himself, whose paintings and prints — in a book of his etchings entitled The Disasters of War, published posthumously in 1863 — depict so effectively the savagery of guerilla warfare.

Kara Walker's work has the same direct power. She uses graphic simplicity for maximum effect. Several of her paintings in color are included in this exhibition, and I admire them, but the cutouts leave little room for the viewer to evade the truth of what her work intends to show. You must view these pieces and you will understand what she's showing. It is victimization writ large, in which oppressors punish the oppressed and, in turn, the oppressed punish each other.

"The End of Uncle Tom" (detail): Kara Walker

The occasions on which she shows kindness — usually of the motherly sort for abused or about-to-be abused children — are very lovingly tender, but so few that you have to search for them.

Walker is thirty-seven years old. She has become so lionized — and so criticized for the shocking abruptness of her work — that her fame is now worldwide. In 1997 she was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award, and she has received numerous other important prizes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York thinks so well of her work that they, too, gave her a major exhibition in 2006.

Interestingly, Walker comes from Stockton, California, where, she says, her youth in terms of racism was relatively benign. Her father received an appointment to teach at Georgia State University when Walker herself was 13-years-old. She says of this move to The South, "I became black in more senses than just the kind of multicultural acceptance that I grew up with in California. Blackness became a very loaded subject, a very loaded thing to be - all about forbidden passions and desires, and all about a history that's still living, very present...the shame of the South and the shame of the South's past; its legacy and its contemporary troubles."