“A Subtlety” uses a familiar festivalist-art recipe: to wit, take a historically freighted figure or motif and remake it, enlarged if possible, in a historically freighted material. The resulting application of one ready-made to another is usually a simplistic one-liner.

But slavery, the sphinx and sugar are too overt and too embedded in this rough, sugarcoated place. Its walls are dark and rusted. When it rains, the ceiling drips molasses as evidenced by the dark spots forming on Sugar Baby, part of a larger deterioration that will continue until the piece closes on July 6. (A very small justice, considering: the land occupied by the warehouse will become a public park, not a condo, according to Creative Time, the nonprofit art organization that commissioned the project).

In addition, unlike most festival-art frivolities, Sugar Baby is an actively sculpted form in which Ms. Walker goes beyond both caricature and realism, making exaggerations and taking liberties that have their own psycho-formal effects. (And possibly some roots in African and pre-Columbian sculpture.) In addition to the Sugar Baby’s enlarged hands, pendulous breasts and her narrow, lioness shoulders, there is her magnificent rear, swooping up almost like a dome from a shortened spine, above shortened thighs and calves. From the back this dome turns into a perfect heart shape, buttocks whose cheeks protect a vulva that might almost be the entrance to a temple or cave, especially factoring in her boulder-size toes as steps. A powerful personification of the most beleaguered demographic in this country — the black woman — shows us where we all come from, innocent and unrefined.

Which brings us to our own self-destructing present, where sugar is something of a scourge, its excessive consumption linked to diseases like obesity and diabetes that disproportionately affect the poor. The circle of exploitation and degradation is in many ways unbroken. No longer a luxury, sugar has become a birthright and the opiate of the masses. We look on it like money, with greed. Heavily promoted, it keeps millions of Americans of all races from fulfilling their potential — an inestimable loss in terms of talent, health and happiness.

A final part of the web of meaning that Ms. Walker has woven around this resonant work can’t help including a black first lady trying to get people to avoid sugar, and a black president whose skin color alone has brought this country’s not-so-buried racism roaring back to furious, mindless life.