In Walker's art, race and romance are passionately and tragically intertwined. Her work is filled with images of sexual couplings between masters and slaves, a theme she explores with seemingly obsessive ardor. These fantasy scenarios are often violent and abject, but they can also be disconcertingly tender, as in this watercolor of a naked black woman suckling at the breast of a sketchily rendered patrician white man, her arms tightly wrapped around his waist. A baby, still attached to its umbilical cord, drops to the ground from between her legs—a reference to the fruit of miscegenation that parallels the infantilizing relationship of slave to master.

The show's title, "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," hints at this complex codependence. Walker has been startlingly forthcoming about the racialized masochism of her own romantic and erotic life and how this has fed into her art. In a recent New Yorker profile, she brings up a long-past relationship with a white man, whom she describes as "a sadist, a racist, a misogynist … and, perhaps less credibly: Satan himself," counting this toxic entanglement as one of the "dark milestones" that helped forge her artistic sense of self.