(Baton Rouge) – Critically acclaimed artist Kara Walker, widely recognized as one of the most significant young artists in the country, will spend the next week visiting the LSU School of Art, where she will meet with graduate students and share her vision and creative insights.

In addition, as part of the College of Art and Design’s Manship Lecture Series, Walker will give a public lecture about her work on Wednesday April 16th at 5 PM in the Design Building lecture hall, room 103, on the LSU campus.

Walker is best known for exploring the issues of race, gender and sexuality through the traditional Victorian medium of the silhouette. She displays her silhouettes directly onto the walls of the gallery, creating a theatrical space for her unruly cut-paper characters. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is currenly on display at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

“Because Kara Walker’s work deals with issues of race and gender, using historical images of slavery, I felt a responsibility to bring awareness of her powerful, beautiful and provocative work here to the deep south,” says LSU associate art history professor Kelli Scott Kelley, who has organized and will be hosting Walker’s visit.

Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. She received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. She currently lives in New York, where she is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University.