BY BOB HOLT

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM

A painting by African-American artist Kara Walker has gone back on display at Newark Library.

The artwork had been covered almost immediately after it was first shown because library workers found it offensive.

NJ.com reported that Walker’s artistic themes are about race, gender, sexuality and violence. This painting shows horrors of reconstruction for blacks, hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan, and a depiction of a white man holding a black woman’s head to his groin.

The artwork by Walker is titled, “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos.” It is from 2010.

Walker said to Art in America, "The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us in a conflicted or contestable space, without real world injury or loss."

Walker further said, "The work is not about slavery so much as it conjures horrors of reconstruction and 20th-century Jim Crow-ism and the Tea Party. I wanted to make a point about the way these images arose for many when Barack Obama gave his national speech on race. And the many times he invokes his or his wife's heritage to make an ideological point about American patriotism, which in some way grants permission to the ghosts of racist terrorism to be reimagined—here with KKK hooded figures, lynched bodies and sexual violence—and these should be horrible to behold, and should feel both familiar and uncomfortable."

The art was put in place on November 19 at Newark Library, and covered by November 24. Library officials have since met with employees about the painting, and the Newark Library hopes to have Walker visit and speak about her work.

According to walkerart.org, Walker received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant in 1997, when she was 27 years old, the youngest recipient ever of the award.