“The Smithsonian American Art Museum will announce today that New Yorker Kara Walker has won its annual Lucelia Artist Award, worth $25,000. Walker, one of the country’s most prominent African American artists, is best known for taking the genteel medium of the Enlightenment silhouette and enlarging it to wall size, then using it to convey surreal images of the antebellum South.” The result is frequently shocking and controversial imagery conveyed in the normally soothing medium of silhouette, making Walker’s art a fascinating reflection of America’s shadowy history of race relations.