Editor's note: The artwork, which can be seen lower in this story, may be offensive to some readers.

The talk at the Newark Library these days has nothing to do with an anticipated book collection, the next visit by schoolchildren or a lecture on Brick City history.

It’s all about a huge drawing hanging in the second-floor reference room, raising so much ruckus that the head librarian has had to cover it up — so no one can see what it shows.

It’s covered with cloth and that’s the way many employees want to keep it.

Kara Walker, a renowned African-American artist who examines race, gender, sexuality and violence, created the drawing. It depicts the horrors of reconstruction, 20th-century Jim Crowism and the hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan.

But that’s not what has people upset.

One part of the drawing shows a white man holding the head of a naked black woman to his groin.

"I didn’t notice it at first," said Kendell Willis, a library services employee. "Then I looked up and was blown away."

Willis sent Library Director Wilma Grey an e-mail, and so has Sandra West, a library associate who called Walker’s work disgusting. She said several employees came to her expressing shock that the library would display such graphic artwork.

"It can go back where it came from," West said. "I really don’t like to see my people like this. We need to see something uplifting and not demeaning."

Grey said she didn’t think there would be this kind of reaction when she had it displayed the week of Thanksgiving in the reference room. What she saw when she decided to accept the work were the atrocities during a factual period in history.

"It evokes man’s inherent ability to be unkind to people," Grey said. "It’s meant to evoke some kind of emotion that says all of these terrible things happened and that we should not be complacent."

Out of respect for their feelings, Grey covered it up after one day, and she plans to meet with the staff to talk about it.

"When it comes to art, you are allowed to react one way or the other," she said. "It’s entirely personal."’

Walker became known for her large black-paper silhouettes when she came on the scene in 1994. Her compositions over the years have been set in the antebellum South and often contain graphic racial stereotypes illustrating injustices suffered by African-Americans. For instance, in "The Battle of Atlanta," there’s a white man raping a black girl as her brother watches and a white child about to sexually mutilate a black woman who is nearly lynched.

Several years ago, a group of African-American artists called her work insulting and one of the those artist tried to organize a museum boycott.

No decision has been made on whether the drawing at the library will be taken down or relocated.

Walker, a recipient of the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s genius grant, said she wasn’t aware that her work was on view at the library.

"I am sorry that the staff is so put off by the work that they feel the need to prevent others from seeing it and making their own call to look or look away," she said. "I don’t advocate any kind of censorship. The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us, viewer and maker, in a conflicted or contestable space, without real world injury or loss."

The title of the work is: "The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos.’’ Yeah, as big as the drawing.

Right now it’s still at the library, hidden from all viewers, just above a desk where patrons normally sit to read. What to do with it is pretty obvious among employees who say it’s more suitable for a museum than the library.

Paul Sternberger, an associate art history professor at Rutgers-Newark, said the imagery in the piece is not uncommon to Walker’s body of work.

"For many years she has been exploring themes of race, gender and oppression, often in a quasi-historical context,’’ Sternberger said. "Often those themes include violent and sexually charged imagery.’’

West knows all about Walker, who also is a Columbia University professor. She said she’s edgy, talented and pushes the envelope.

"That’s what she does," West said. "It’s frightening."

Not for now. Not if you can’t see it