The American artist Kara Walker visited Rome from February through early April as AAR’s Roy Lichtenstein Artist in Residence. Her powerful body of work has all but eclipsed the origins of delicate black paper silhouettes as a miniature form of portraiture that once amused aristocratic Europeans. In her words, “the silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.” Working with cut paper as well as film, light projection, puppets, performance, and sculpture, Walker has expanded the territory of the silhouette, reinventing image-making and storytelling while inspiring a new conversation about representational art and an artist’s oeuvre as a larger political project.

Walker’s first public-art project, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, was the most talked-about event of the art world in 2014. The formidable installation—a huge, sphinxlike, crouching nude “Mammy,” built with thirty tons of white sugar, surrounded by life-sized figures of slave boys, cast in drippy molasses—addressed racial stereotyping along with themes of exploitation, displacement, transformation, and other socioeconomic complexities related to sugar production and gentrification. The artist described the piece as “a metaphor for identity formation” that captures the poignancy of its location, a soon-to-be-demolished factory that “refined” something brown into something white. As with all her work, the sculpture balanced the sublime and the absurd, the beautiful and the grotesque, examining the shameful legacies of the past and their impact on society today.