Fallen Confederate Statues Take Center Stage in the Year’s Boldest Show

The artist Kara Walker has sculpted a disordered new centaur: an American centaur, American in its bones and in its burdens. Hers is a 13-foot-tall tumbledown bronze, with a man’s limbs and a horse’s haunches. One limb, clad in a Southern officer’s sleeve, droops alongside its four hooves and lets a sword clatter to the battlefield. Inch by soldered inch, from shoulder to hind shank, Walker’s horse and rider fuse from two beasts into one. Her centaur is tall, midstride but weary. It rattles its metal parts through American purgatory.

It’s titled “Unmanned Drone.” Walker completed it in 2023, though its constituent parts are much older: They belonged to a monumental equestrian statue of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, which stood for a century in Charlottesville, Va. After the “Unite the Right” rally of 2017, which began with neo-Nazis marching with torches and ended with a woman’s death, the City Council voted to bring the statue down. There were hearings. There were lawsuits. Walker got her hands on it almost five years later.

It is a silent carve-up, strangely serene, and all the more lethal for that. It exceeds, in both material and symbolic weight, Walker’s 2014 sphinx of sugar. It confirms that this artist, who came to prominence by rechanneling racist and belittling imagery into disturbing silhouettes, is also a truly excellent large-scale sculptor. And it is the standout achievement of “Monuments” — a destined-to-be-disputed group exhibition debuting Oct. 23 in Los Angeles, which faces down past and present hatreds with startling confidence.

The year’s most audacious and contentious new show brings out — after years of wrangling, and with heightened security — nearly a dozen Confederate memorials removed from view in the last decade. Massive, weathered, in some cases paint-splattered, these monuments by long-dead sculptors (who were all white) share the floor — in a very thorny way — with 19 contemporary artists (who are overwhelmingly Black) working in more experimental modes. You will remember the debates when the statues here fell: A liberal consensus wanted them “retained and explained,” more radical voices preferred a junkyard burial. The artists and organizers of “Monuments” have a third response: Treat them as your inheritance, and use them as you like.

Walker’s centaur stands alone at the Brick, a nonprofit art space formerly known as LAXART. All the other artists, living and dead, are at the Geffen Contemporary space of the Museum of Contemporary Art, known as MOCA. To obtain the decommissioned monuments was a battle-scarred effort by Hamza Walker, the director of the Brick; Bennett Simpson, a longtime MOCA curator; and Kara Walker herself. (The lenders include the cities of Baltimore and Montgomery, Ala., as well as institutions of Black history in Virginia that are now their custodians.)

The friction, even perversity, is very much the point. To its great credit, “Monuments” is an art exhibition and not a historical dossier — tasking us to look, with neither sympathy nor prejudice, at bronzes more shouted about than gazed upon.

The artists who devised these Confederate tributes are credited as sculptors, in the same manner as the living practitioners. Frederick Wellington Ruckstull, the most prominent Beaux-Arts figure in this show, was commissioned by the Maryland branch of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to commemorate the dead of the secessionist army and navy. Dedicated in 1903, his 13-foot-tall monument represents a tight-lipped angel bearing a laurel crown in her left hand, and cradling with her right a slumping rebel soldier. It was removed in 2017, and here at MOCA the protesters’ red paint still stains the angel’s stern countenance, the soldier’s suppurating chest.

If the curators treat these monuments as sculptures first, they have not sanitized them: not politically, and not physically either. Laura Gardin Fraser, a prolific Northern sculptor, was commissioned by a Confederate sympathizer to memorialize Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Her 16-foot dual equestrian statue, stolid, prosaic, stood until 2017 in a park near the Baltimore Museum of Art, where an inscription on the pedestal declared that Jackson and Lee were “Christian soldiers” who “fought like gentlemen.” Here in Los Angeles it lords over the Geffen warehouse, but if you circle it you will see the recent graffito “BEWARE TRAITORS” spray-painted on its base.

I’m aware that some visitors, if they visit at all, will feel that any aesthetic lens is granting a legitimacy to objects they see as simple instruments of racial dominance. Let me suggest, though, that the white cube of MOCA has a powerful neutralizing effect. These giant things sit directly on the floor. Their malignancy dissolves in part because of their scale, which feels goofy and graceless in an indoor display. (In places, the show recalls the graveyards of toppled totalitarian sculpture you can see in Estonia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet states.)

Descended from their pedestals, denuded of their inscriptions, the statues can be assessed here not for whom they depict but what they are: works of Jim Crow-era propaganda. They are classical in style but modern in message, and they relied on repeated iconographic tropes to romanticize the antebellum South and expunge slavery from the story of the Civil War. Generals peering into the middle distance. Mothers weeping over their beautiful boys. These were Lost Cause fabrications of the 20th century, quite unlike the solemn Victorian memorials that arose after 1865. And while some, such as Ruckstull’s angel, were genuine artworks, many more were mass-produced commodities, churned out by foundries (in the North, often) and cloned across the segregated South.

More than 200 Confederate monuments were decommissioned in the last decade. But another 700 remain in place — and a few are coming back. This past summer, the Pentagon announced that it would restore to Arlington National Cemetery a Confederate memorial, removed in 2023, which incorporates loathsome imagery of loyal slaves alongside their benevolent masters. (“We don’t follow the woke lemmings off the cliff that want to tear down statues,” Pete Hegseth told Fox News, where he was a talk-show host before becoming defense secretary.)

Woke lemmings or no, the contemporary artists in “Monuments” affirm that democracies, like statues, rise up and tumble down. Their contributions are of mixed quality, though there are some major works in film and video: Stan Douglas’s “Birth of a Nation” remakes the D.W. Griffith movie, perhaps the most significant artwork of the Lost Cause, as a five-channel neurotic fantasy. Kevin Jerome Everson offers a cool, compassionate portrait in black-and-white of the activist Richard Bradley, who used his skill climbing poles for the telephone company to rip down a Confederate flag in San Francisco in the 1980s. Far lusher is Julie Dash’s “Homegoing,” made with the bass-baritone Davóne Tines: an ultra-widescreen, ultra-hi-def rendition of the civil rights anthem “This Little Light of Mine,” performed at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., where a white supremacist killed nine Black people in 2015.

I never said this show was subtle. But neither is it gratuitous: Here is the art of America, one big happy family. The spiritual from Dash’s video bleeds into the large gallery where Fraser’s double Lee-Jackson equestrian statue galumphs. The generals must also dwell with one of Hank Willis Thomas’s many overbearing one-note puns: a replica of the Dodge Charger driven by the rednecks of “The Dukes of Hazzard” TV series, turned on its side so the Confederate flag decal on the roof faces out.

Elsewhere, Leonardo Drew proposes a minimal cenotaph made of 900 pounds of baled cotton. Nona Faustine, a photographer who died earlier this year, stands nude on an auction block in the middle of Wall Street. The curators are sticking up hard for memorial strategies that James E. Young, a historian of the Holocaust, termed the “countermonument”: negative, abstract, or self-conscious forms that tried to balance an ethical duty to history with a skepticism of naturalistic representation. Some of these countermonuments, like Douglas’s remake, have real power. More get overpowered by the bronzes.

To be sure, these countermonumental techniques were hardly the most celebrated cultural responses to the racial reckoning of the late 2010s, when kitschy portraiture became art’s lingua franca of “resistance.” Nor have our municipalities shown much desire to move past the traditional monument form. (In Roanoke, Va., a statue of Lee was replaced in 2023 by a bronze memorial to Henrietta Lacks — which, it gives me no pleasure to say, is more visually facile than the thing it replaced.) How do you give shape to history? Lots of people seem to like hulking bronzes just fine. They just want different people on the pedestals.

But maybe even the most traditional sculpture has a countermonument within. I went back to the Brick, to the unpieced Stonewall Jackson and the war horse that became a celebrity in the postwar South. I was trying to understand just how Walker disassembled and reassembled Charles Keck’s original equestrian statue: how a hand becomes a hoof, how a human torso meets an equine mane.

On the rear side were two elements I missed the first time, which came from neither horse nor rider. They were metal panels in dull gray, contrasting with the century-thick Charlottesville verdigris of the rest of the centaur. The panels were the joints of the Jackson monument — hidden from the rain and pollution since 1921, and revealed only when the general was unhorsed. White supremacy, like any monumental thing, did not stand up on its own; it had a structure, an architectonic principle. And here are the hidden parts that kept it erect.