A new Bellevue Arts Museum exhibit may just be Bellevue’s window into the national conversation on race and violence.

As the country grapples with the violence committed against African-Americans, “Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power” challenges attendees’ stereotypes and the country’s idealization of slavery and their liberation after the Civil War.

“Emancipating the Past” comes to the city from the private collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, a Portland collector of contemporary art who regularly lends out his collections, including Walkers’ work, which ranks among his favorites.

He considers Walker the preeminent African-American artist in the country right now, he said.

The California-born artist has become well known for her controversial work exploring themes of race, gender, sexuality and violence through antiquated media such as cut-paper silhouettes, 8mm film and 19th century printmaking. At the age of 27, Walker became the second-youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s genius grant.

Much of her work explores the Antebellum south and is infinitely layered, though the prints themselves are made with a simple medium. Walker’s collections generally employ black silhouettes on a white background, intentionally abstract to let viewer’s own stereotypes about African-Americans lead their interpretations of each piece. Such a stark palate contrasts the complexity of its themes.

That’s perhaps part of why the final piece of the Bellevue Arts Museum’s exhibit, titled “The Emancipation Approximation,” is so complex and memorable.

The two dozen images draw from mythology to timeline Walker’s predicted failure of the United States’ race relations and the now-debunked idea that modern Americans live in a “post-racial society.”

The tropes of early race relations — Uncle Tom, Mamie, American presidents and the sexualized black female slave — interact with a stark white swan, a nod to the Greek Myth of Leda and the Swan in which the god Zeus takes the form of a swan to either seduce or violate Leda. While in mythology, the interaction led to something beautiful — the birth of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Walker’s story, on the other hand, does not romanticize the interaction and instead ends with a woman of unknown race standing with an ax above the severed heads of the other characters.

History (and the white Americans who wrote the books on the subject) has sentimentalized race relations in the country, Walker argues in her art. Her 2013 series “Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War” takes the widely celebrated illustrations of the Civil War that ran in Harper’s Weekly in 1866 and exposes their white-washed and glossed-over nature.

Where has that left the country? As Walker and current events indicate, on shaky ground.

“I mean, when you look at the events in Dallas, we keep seeing the same thing over and over again — man and woman’s inhumanity toward one another. Intolerance seems to be something we can’t get over,” Schnitzer said.

“Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power” runs through Nov. 27.