Kara Walker’s 2002 sculpture The Bush, Skinny, De-Boning uses silhouetted forms to depict how the violence of slavery reverberates within Black communities. Across three panels, Walker shows a woman turning a hoe against herself, forcing a child to consume a phallic object, and grappling with a dismembered head—each act revealing how internalized trauma and inherited pain take root. The work confronts the impossibility of clean separation from racial violence, suggesting that its legacy persists through both bloodlines and memory.

“Kara Walker’s unwieldy imagination is fixated with race in the starkest and most American of terms, black and white, as they were forged in the ante-bellum South, a time not so long ago in a galaxy called here.” – Hamza Walker, Parkett No. 59, 2000