While Trump restores Confederate monuments, this bold L.A. art exhibition confronts them

For the past decade, Confederate memorials have been a flashpoint in America’s heated culture wars. More than 150 statues and monuments were doused with paint, defaced and brought down by protesters, but in President Trump’s second term, they are being reinstalled. A statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike is returning to Judiciary Square in Washington, D.C., and another, known as the “Reconciliation Monument,” will be restored to Arlington Cemetery.

The tumultuous state of affairs is supercharging a provocative, highly anticipated new exhibition titled “Monuments,” featuring nearly a dozen removed statues, some towering up to 15 feet. The show, co-organized and co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick, opens Thursday and runs through May 3, 2026.

“Monuments” was originally supposed to debut two years ago, and if it had, it would have entered a radically different political landscape.

“Suddenly everyone thinks that we’re doing this in response to our president, which isn’t at all the case. This is more a case of the political moment coming around to capture us,” said MOCA senior curator Bennett Simpson, who organized the show alongside Brick director Hamza Walker, artist Kara Walker (no relation to Hamza), Brick curatorial associate Hannah Burstein and MOCA curatorial assistant Paula Kroll.

The urgent, raw and ongoing nature of the public debate around civil rights, made all the more incendiary by the Trump administration’s attempts to minimize the history of slavery by threatening to remove artworks related to it at the Smithsonian and national parks, contributes to the power of the exhibition, which juxtaposes the statues with art that elicits emotionally charged responses.

“This is an associative poetic art show,” Simpson says of the 18 participating artists.

At MOCA, a statue titled “Confederate Women of Maryland,” erected in Baltimore by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, features two women — one of whom is cradling a fallen male soldier in her lap in a tableau resembling Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” This monument resides directly across from a series of photographs by John Henry featuring Black mothers similarly holding their sons in urban environments.

A statue of Matthew Fontaine Maury in MOCA’s “Monuments” exhibition. Maury is considered the father of modern oceanography. He also wanted to expand slavery to Brazil.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Some, such as a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, were splattered in paint by protesters. Others, including the base of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, were covered in graffiti with phrases like “Protect Black Women.” They appear in the museum just as they looked when they were removed from parks and plazas in Richmond and Charlottesville, Va., respectively. Davis now rests on his side in a room with a group of chilling photographs taken by Andres Serrano of hooded Ku Klux Klan leaders in Georgia.

A statue of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — who in 1857 wrote the majority opinion in the notorious Dred Scott case, which ruled that slaves could never be citizens and were thus property — sits beside a statue of prominent newspaper owner Josephus Daniels, who helped foment the 1898 Wilmington massacre in which a mob of more than 2,000 white supremacists killed as many as 300 people in the course of overthrowing the city’s duly elected biracial government.

Across from these frozen-in-time relics is a wall of studio portraits of Black North Carolinians taken in 1910 by photographer Hugh Mangum, whose contact sheets of both Black and white people show that he ran an integrated studio in the Jim Crow South. The people in the proud, haunting photos would have been alive during the Wilmington massacre, Simpson noted.

“It felt important for him to meet his public,” Simpson said, gesturing at Daniels.

Hamza Walker first conceived of “Monuments” when the statues began coming down in the wake of the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. The hate crime, which targeted Black people, resulted in nine deaths and sparked a mass movement against the veneration of figures who fought to perpetuate slavery in America.

What to do with the country’s many Confederate statues and monuments had become a matter for debate. Some people thought they should remain untouched, with added plaques addressing the history of slavery. Others felt they should be destroyed.

Hamza Walker wanted to use them in an art exhibition and ask artists to respond.

For the most part, the removed statues were tucked away out of sight. The pieces featured in “Monuments” are on loan to MOCA, trucked in on tractor trailers from whatever obscure location they were stored — hidden under tarps in water treatment facilities and stashed in warehouses alongside bags of salt and snow plows.

Getting the monuments proved to be a time-consuming undertaking, made all the more so by their controversial nature. After the city of New Orleans took down four statues in May 2017, a fierce backlash erupted, culminating in the infamous Charlottesville rally in August. For two days during what is now called “the Summer of Hate,” white nationalists and neo-Nazis carrying tiki torches, swastikas and Confederate flags filled the streets. A man rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a 32-year-old, and President Trump famously declared there were “very fine people on both sides.”

The “Monuments” curators spent countless hours writing detailed proposals about how they intended to use the statues, which, for the most part, have to be returned. They needed to give assurances that the pieces would be treated with care, insured and protected from harm.

A single monument is housed across town at the Brick — it is set in relief because it stands in a category all its own, said Hamza Walker. The sculpture, Kara Walker’s “Unmanned Drone,” is the only monument that has been physically altered.

Walker used a plasma cutter to slice apart a statue of prominent Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, which she welded back together in an entirely new form. Jackson no longer has a face, but his hair is speared by a portion of his horse’s upper thigh. The horse now appears to be standing upright with its head protruding from the back of its saddle. Jackson’s arm, which was amputated before his death, is now separated from his body and affixed to the edge of the statue’s base. His legs are sliced open, and his saber rests on the ground beside the dissected, reconfigured whole.

The effect is breathtaking and violent.

“Ideologically it’s an affront, aesthetically it’s an affront … on a piano, it’s not just a chord, this is a tone cluster,” said Hamza Walker, of the reimagined statue. “Kara went for it. She did what artists do in terms of marshaling an energy and force, and then concentrating it on this object and coming up with this piece.”

The statue was deeded to the Brick — which wrote a competitive proposal to get it — for the sole purpose of transformation. This is because the statue, by virtue of its recent, ugly history, had become radioactive, Hamza Walker said.

That history is detailed in photos, newspaper articles and letters at the Brick. The year after the Charleston church massacre, a young Black woman, Zyahna Bryant, petitioned the city of Charlottesville to remove its statues of Jackson and Lee. In the midst of her efforts, the city became the national focal point of ongoing American racism as Unite the Right protesters gathered around Lee’s statue in Market Street Park.

“The mask is off, right? These things are now straight-up toxic, there’s no going back,” Hamza Walker said of the Charlottesville statues, explaining that the city’s mandate was to get rid of them, not to just put them in storage. “That’s what distinguishes Charlottesville from other places.”

In 2023, the city gave its Lee statue to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which spearheaded a project to melt the 10,000-pound statue and use the resulting bronze ingots for an entirely new piece of art.

Kara Walker‘s sculpture seeks to take the focus off Jackson and put it on his horse, a trusty steed named Little Sorrel that Jackson valued for his bravery in battle. Jackson died from his wounds eight days after being hit by friendly fire while returning to camp during the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. He attained saint-like status in the South, which surrendered the Civil War two years later. Little Sorrel was also revered. The red war horse lived to a ripe old age and was trotted out for special events. True believers took patches of Little Sorrel’s fur, and upon its death, the horse was taxidermied.

“With the nature of this object, what do you do with it?” Hamza Walker said of the Jackson statue. “Yeah, here’s your monument back.”

Andres Serrano’s series “Great Titan of the Invisible Empire” at MOCA’s “Monuments” exhibit. The 1990 portraits feature Ku Klux Klan leaders in Georgia.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

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