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New York — It's the day before Kara Walker's solo show opens at her gallery in the heart of Chelsea's art district. Passers-by hoping for a sneak peek stoop to peer beneath the half-lowered shades. Callers inquire whether she will be present at the reception — people who want to meet her, or even, the gallery owner suggests, touch her, as groupies would a rock star.

The 37-year-old Walker is not just a star. In today's art world, she is a supernova. And this is the former Atlantan's moment: A triumphant retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of three exhibits in New York alone. She's on magazine covers, in bookstores. Critics suggest comparisons to Goya, the venerated Spanish Old Master.

Tina Fineberg/ Associated Press (ENLARGE)
Kara Walker stands in front of 'Authenticating the Artifact' (detail above), one of her new pieces using exploded-quilt imagery, unveiled at her current solo exhibit in New York. A full retrospective of the ACA grad's work is on view at the Whitney Museum of Art.
Tina Fineberg/Associated Press (ENLARGE)
A master of irony, Walker conveys the barbarity of racism, exemplified in the lynching depected in this detail of 'Divining Rod,' in the seductively beautiful language of this silhouette.
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The Museum of Modern Art just announced the acquisition of her 1994 breakout piece, "Gone, an Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart." A savage parody of the moonlight-and-magnolia version of the antebellum South, the 50-foot-long mural depicts violence, perversity and indignity as the true face of a society deformed by slavery and racism.

Presented in the deceptively staid form of silhouettes — a genre that's become her signature — "Gone" tramples taste and political correctness. Pickaninnies, mammies and such are perpetrators as well as victims.

You might imagine the artist behind such provocations as a latter-day Black Panther. Belligerent, maybe. Fierce, at least. You would not likely imagine the self-deprecating, soft-spoken woman, who is, on this rainy day, walking around the cavernous gallery in galoshes. Despite the footwear, the tall (5-foot-10), willowy artist moves with a feline grace.

She exhibits a cat's self-possession as well. When Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, stops in at the Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery to preview the show, her greeting is polite but brief, far from ingratiating, and definitely not deferential.

The fury that permeates her art is absent from her persona. Only the occasional sardonic remark, escaping in conversation like a volcano venting a puff of smoke, hints at the fires raging deep below.

"It comes straight out of a core of me, from a place that needed to be emptied," she said. "If [my public persona] were like that, I wouldn't need to paint."

Confronting racism

Kara Walker was 13 years old when her father, an artist and academic, moved his family from California to become director of the School of Art at Georgia State University in 1983. (Retired but active as an artist, Larry Walker has an exhibit at Mason Murer Fine Art.)

It was a traumatic transition. Walker recalls her early childhood in the central California city of Stockton as an Eden of diversity and harmony. Atlanta was the fall from grace.

Sitting in the gallery's conference room, the artist mentions that she found her "Save the Children" button on a recent trip home. "We moved a year into the child murders. I thought, 'OK, they are killing black children about my age.' I arrived with a weird, mute sense of dread."

The family moved to Stone Mountain. In the shadow of the Confederate leaders in carved granite, the girl who had "tripped through life without any thought of racism" now encountered a community carved into black and white.

Experiences of racism, both pointed and casual, caused her to begin questioning her identity. "It was revelation to me that to be a 'black girl' was understood by some as a being with finite prospects," she said.

While a student at the Atlanta College of Art, she began to doubt the value, and authenticity, of her apolitical paintings. In 1991, the year she graduated, Walker made what she calls "my first race piece." On a stool, she placed five cans of shoe polish whose labels featured Muhammad Ali and the words "The Champ's Shoe Polish." Exhibited in "Black Men: Image/Reality," it was prophetic of her future work in its tone, wordplay and confrontation with stereotypes.

'New way of thinking'

Walker developed her thinking as a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design. But the chance discovery of a silhouette of a black girl in a book on American art was an epiphany. The silhouette, she found, was just the vehicle she needed. An embodiment of pertinent opposites — black/white, positive/negative — it also played to her satiric bent. Plus, it made use of her superb drawing (and scissors) skills.

The combination of form and content impressed viewers from the start. Museum of Modern Art director Lowry remembers his first encounter, at her 1994 debut. "I stepped back and went, 'Wow!' Afterward. I couldn't get it out of my head.

"She [has introduced] an utterly new way of thinking about race, identity and history," Lowry said. "She transforms a language you think you know with the sharp edge of the present."

MOMA, which began collecting her work in 1997, owns 25 prints and drawings in addition to the recent acquisition of "Gone."

A New Yorker now, Walker returns to Atlanta only to visit family — her mother, father and older brother (an older sister lives in California) — and friends. But Atlanta has never left her. It remains the embodiment of her loss of innocence and consequent disappointment in humanity, which encompasses the consumerist strivings of the black middle class as well as condescending whites. And the catalyst for her art.

"Atlanta's Southern mythologies forced me to grow up and act out (at least in my work) as a form of resistance to these limited prospects (... folk hero, righteous freedom fighter, mammy, invisible black child, hooker, or some other foil for white power)," she said in an e-mail.

"Gone" might be her "Carrie" moment: a mocking of Atlanta's favorite novel, its Cyclorama, and self-satisfied, too-busy-to-hate decorum.

Turbulent ascent

After her initial success, Walker decided it was important for her development as an artist "to keep a lot of balls in the air." Working in a variety of media beyond silhouette — drawings, prints, films, books and now collages — have helped her amplify her core issues: race, gender and power, and their representation in history and media.

Her ascent to the top of the art world has not been without turbulence. For the generation of African-American artists who fought for civil and artistic rights, Walker's demeaning imagery was a betrayal. Shortly after she received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award — or "genius" grant — in 1997, a group of them launched a public campaign against her work.

Betye Saar, a pillar of the older generation, attacked Walker's integrity, charging that "Kara is selling us down the river."

Walker expected controversy; she had, after all, thumbed her nose at conventional identity politics, particularly in her implication of victim as accomplice. But she was surprised by its personal nature. "I had anticipated a response in kind, like a rap argument," Walker said. "I was hoping to raise a conversation."

She mentions, with quiet pride, how her father, who sometimes wears the "fear-no-art" cap she gave him, took on his peers in an 11-page letter asserting that she was "doing what we said we should be able to do." Her own response was to stay quiet.

"She was very wise about it," said Atlanta artist Jennifer Cawley, a college friend. "She let the work speak for itself."

Cawley says Walker was supportive in April when her husband, artist Alvaro Alvillar, found himself in the middle of a racial controversy over his painting "Formula for Hate" at City Gallery East.

The vituperations have quieted, but doubts remain.

Spelman Museum of Fine Art director Andrea Barnwell Brownlee has Walker's work on exhibit now and calls it "fascinating and important" but also troubling.

Brownlee suspects that the appetite for images that meld race and perversity says something about art-world racism. She wonders, for example, whether the same people would have championed the work had the artist and her characters been, say, Jewish or Chinese.

Neither public attacks nor lingering doubts have impeded the Walker juggernaut, though. "It didn't affect sales," said gallery co-owner Michael Jenkins, who had already sold the major pieces in the show to carefully selected collectors and institutions — for up to $300,000 a pop.

Standing in the center of the white-walled gallery as the new show is hung, he and Walker banter like old friends. They go back a ways, before they even knew each other. As a graduate art student at Georgia State University, Jenkins had observed her father teach.

"He took a classic approach," he recalled. "It was important to learn to draw. I can see where Kara picked that up."

They reminisce about the reception for the 1997 Whitney Museum Biennial. She remembers being so excited she got a nosebleed. They laugh about the admirer who continued to demand an autograph even as she wiped her face. He reminds her of the buttons her mother made, exclaiming "I'm Kara's Mom" and "I'm Kara's Dad."

Another grin. "My family keeps me honest," she said.

The artist does not appear particularly pumped up about the impending opening. She is ambivalent about the spotlight. "I don't know what to do with all the attention, but I know the withdrawal would be difficult," she said.

"I have what any artist wants: to be able to make art and have it seen and thought about. I was never looking for fame and glory. Once you have it, though, you want to keep it."

If she feels the pressure, she doesn't let it show. Rather, asked where she goes from here, she projects a serene confidence.

"I have other stories to tell," she said.

KARA WALKER ON VIEW

In Atlanta

• High Museum of Art. Permanent collection on Skyway, Wieland Pavilion. Ongoing.

• Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. "Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970." Through Dec. 8. (Also in Part II, opening Jan. 24, 2008.)

In New York

• Whitney Museum of American Art. "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love." Through Feb. 3.

• New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. "Kara Walker on the Occasion of Margaret Garner," Through Nov. 18.

• Sikkema Jenkins & Co. "New Work." Through Nov. 21.

• Museum of Modern Art. "Repicturing the Past/Picturing the Present." Closed Nov. 5 but viewable online (www.moma.org).

In Washington, D.C.

• Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Celebrating the Lucelia Artist Award, 2001-2006." Through June 22, 2008.