One of the most celebrated artists working in the United States today, Kara Walker is also one of the most provocative. She frequently creates work that is challenging in both form and content. The subjects of her early cut-paper drawings are often acting out, mutilating and fighting one another. She also recycles the imagery of old racist caricatures and stereotypes, redeploying them in the present to remind us of an ugly past. Walker’s new installation, for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is her third major public commission in the past decade, following 2014’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a gargantuan sugar sphinx with the head of a kerchiefed Black woman, displayed in a soon-to-be-demolished former Domino Sugar plant on the Brooklyn waterfront, and 2019’s Fons Americanus, a monumental fountain parodying London’s Queen Victoria Memorial and reflecting on the history of Britain’s maritime empire. Both of those drew from images of the past in order to examine the unequal nature of the present, but her new work is something different, argues Rachel Hunter Himes in a long career-spanning essay-review in our March issue. Bearing a monumentally long title (Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) / A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. / Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners / Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious / by Kara E-Walker), her new work is more about our future—a future that might be as gravely unequal and troubled as today. As Himes writes: “Departing from the plantation, where Walker has often found her motifs, it turns instead to a field closely associated with the Bay Area—robotics.” Read “The Art and Automatons of Kara Walker”