When you step off the elevator into Kara Walker's midcareer survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first thing you see is an enormous mural of nearly life-sized, cut-black-paper silhouettes pasted on a long white wall. The piece was first shown at the Drawing Center in SoHo in 1994, when Walker was 24 and fresh out of graduate school. Its technical finesse and surreal, raunchy, politically incorrect subject matter dazzled viewers and brought Walker instant acclaim. Now, more than a decade later, her elegant, brilliantly twisted take on race and racism in America continues to astound.

Flamboyantly titled Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, the mural is a perverse phantasmagoria that wreaks havoc on the genteel mythology of the antebellum South. On the far left, beneath a tree dripping with Spanish moss, a Southern belle leans in for a kiss from her courtly suitor. But something's wrong: An extra pair of legs mysteriously juts out from under her hoop skirt (who's hiding under there?), and the young man's sword grazes the butt of a naked child with nappy braids who strangles a duck at the edge of the bayou. Welcome to Walker's nightmare.