Known for her life-size installations of paper silhouettes, Walker's arresting work explores race, gender, and violence.

Walker studied painting and printmaking at the Atlanta College of Art before moving north to earn her MFA from RISD. As a grad student she became obsessed with images from colonial history and began experimenting with her signature style: silhouettes evoking themes of slavery and brutality. Walker made a splash on the art scene in 1994, at the age of 24, when her work debuted at the Drawing Center in SoHo: She was offered a 50-foot wall to exhibit on and she used the entire surface to glue up black and white paper images, a panoramic technique that became a Walker trademark. A few years later her exhibition at Wooster Gardens, in which her life-size silhouettes depicted a surreal and fantastical version of plantation life, earned her the embrace of art critics then in 1997, still in her twenties, she was included in the Whitney Biennial. Walker continues to turn out new work, and also has occasionally taught at Columbia. Nightmarish but visually beautiful, Walker's large scale and multi-medium installations feature outrageous images of sodomy, pedophilia, and ravaged, distorted or severed bodies, and play with antebellum folklore and racial stereotypes, eliciting a discomforting range of reactions in spectators. "Kara's work," says Thelma Golden "takes from fact but also fantasy and throws on its head any notion we might have of good and bad, right and wrong, black and white." [Image via Getty]