MONUMENTAL UNDERTAKING
by Sharon Mizota
A statue of Jefferson Davis lays before portraits of Klan members at MOCA. (Stefanie Keenan / Getty Images)
In 1982, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial appeared on the mall in Washington, D.C., its minimalist aesthetic caused a stir. The black granite walls, set into the earth and inscribed with the names of American casualties, were described as "a black gash of shame." The monument’s designer, Maya Lin, was assailed with racist slurs, her Chinese American identity conflated with the war’s Vietnamese adversaries. The monument is now one of the most visited in D.C., but the struggle it brought to light — involving racism and aesthetics — is once again on full view.
The racial justice movements of the last decade spurred the removal of dozens of Confederate monuments across the country. These tributes to the Lost Cause masked the explicitly White supremacist foundations of the Confederacy with tales of military valor and sacrifice. Now they are making a comeback: the Trump administration brazenly calls for their reinstatement while erasing histories that defy its White Christian Nationalist worldview.
Into this fraught moment enters the much-anticipated exhibition MONUMENTS, which juxtaposes 10 mostly Confederate statues with artworks by 19 contemporary artists and one 19th-century one. Now open at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo and The Brick in East Hollywood, this two-part show offers a timely reexamination of who and what we commemorate and how we remember. It unsettles the aesthetics of White supremacy and proposes different strategies for acknowledging the past and moving forward — together.
The Confederate Soldiers & Sailors Monument by Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl in Baltimore in 2017. (Picture Architect / Alamy)
I was reminded of Lin’s memorial when I stuck my head inside abstract artist Torkwase Dyson’s reflective, obsidian sculptures at the Geffen. Each of the three, beveled, monolith-like forms offers a dark mirror to its surroundings on all sides except where a matte black rectangle opens on a void of imperceptible depth. Although not a monument per se, it functions like one: reflecting us back to ourselves and evoking inchoate feelings that defy easy representation. Like Lin’s design, it invites engagement, awe, and contemplation.
By contrast, a 1903 bronze by Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl, which once inhabited a prominent plaza in Baltimore, is something I’d ignore while walking through a park. Rendered in moribund Neoclassical style (an aesthetic based on romanticization of ancient Greco-Roman culture), it depicts a winged, female figure propping up a dying man with one arm and raising a coronal wreath with the other. Created to vindicate the Confederacy, its melodramatic mourning and self-righteous defiance make it an instrument of White supremacist terror. This violence has been made visceral by the streams of red paint protestors threw on it after the murderous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
The Geffen galleries hold many other similarly revealing comparisons. Frederick William Sievers’ 1929 statue of Confederate naval officer and oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury features an enormous globe resting atop a swirl of bodies. It is surrounded by Georgia-born painter Walter Price’s oceanic, riotously colorful paintings composed of horizontal rows of his own footprints. Countering a worldview built on the subjugation of unidentified masses, Price’s paintings find sublimity in the simple evidence of an individual, marching resolutely forward, one step at a time.
Jon Henry, Untitled #31, Wynwood, FL, 2017. (Jon Henry)
An adjoining gallery examines mourning through the lens of motherhood. J. Maxwell Miller’s 1917 statue depicts a Confederate woman holding the body of her dying son in the manner of a pietà — a popular Christian motif of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. But empathy is foreclosed by a second, standing female figure who looks, not down in sadness, but vigilantly outwards: a proto-Karen, scanning the horizon. Her gaze is returned across the room by the Black mothers in New York artist Jon Henry’s color photographs. They also pose as pietàs with their living sons, quietly invoking the ever-present threat of death faced by Black men.
Standing on a high pedestal in between these interlocked visions is L.A. sculptor Karon Davis’ plaster cast of her own Black son holding a miniaturized horse and rider — a classic monument subject — by the horse’s tail. As the animal dangles like a dead rat, its rider begins to slide from the saddle. Davis’ surreal monument shifts the focus from mournful motherhood to propose a liberated future.
Yet the most unsettling intervention comes from the singular Kara Walker over at The Brick. Dismemberment rather than disposal is at issue in Unmanned Drone. Once installed in Charlottesville, the bronze statue of Confederate general Thomas Johnathan “Stonewall” Jackson on his horse was acquired by The Brick and given to Walker, who cut it up and reassembled the pieces into a lumbering new being: a faceless, Frankenstein’s monster of horse and human.
Kara Walker, Unmanned Drone, 2023, at The Brick. (Ruben Diaz / Kara Walker / Sikkema Malloy Jenkins)
Preservationists may clutch their pearls (as an erstwhile archivist, I may have stifled a gasp) that Walker has dismantled and remixed an actual Confederate monument — not a replica, not a picture, not a silhouette. Her signature brand of perverse pastiche has finally found its best use. The old sculpture, like White supremacy, is gone and still here: broken, mixed-up, monstrous, lurching blindly forward. The work unearths the ravages of the past and the present, while aggressively asserting there will be no going back.
Through its collisions and conversations, MONUMENTS makes it clear that we need new ways of remembering. One of the most resonant proposals comes in the form of a short film, HOMEGOING, by singer Davóne Tines and influential filmmaker Julie Dash, on view at the Geffen. It records Tines and his band, The Truth, performing their version of the Civil Rights anthem “This Little Light of Mine” inside the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina — the site of a 2015 mass shooting by a White supremacist — and under the spreading branches of the Angel Oak, a massive, 400-year-old tree located 30 minutes away. The faces of the singers are somber and resolved, the song lush and expansive. It reverberates through the space, and I felt it in my bones. In those few short moments, it became clear that true monuments are not simply bodies of metal or stone: they are us.
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MONUMENTS is on view at MOCA and The Brick through May 3rd, 2026; moca.org and the-brick.org.
Co-curator Hamza Walker joined KCRW’s Madeleine Brand on Press Play to talk about how the team gathered the Confederate statues on view — listen here. (Find the segment at 34:08.)
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