Los Angeles
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick
Ascending the steps at MOCA Geffen’s 55,000-square-foot space slowly reveals the immensity of this important and impactful exhibition (on view through May 3, 2026), which examines the functions of monuments and memorialization, and how historical monuments continue to affect us individually, culturally, and collectively as a nation. Back in 2019, Hamza Walker, director of The Brick, came to Bennett Simpson, MOCA’s senior curator, with the idea of using decommissioned Confederate monuments as the basis for a contemporary art exhibition. He also encouraged Kara Walker (no relation) to join as an artist and co-curator. In total, the exhibition took eight years to develop.
From the upper platform at MOCA, where all of the works except for Walker’s are on view, viewers can absorb an overview looking down through three center galleries, a design that emphasizes a deep historical perspective. Large-scale bronze monuments, contested and removed from public space, stand out against white walls. Stripped of the pedestals that had elevated their stature and potency, these now modest statues are now further diminished by the countervailing presence of works by 19 contemporary artists. On loan (including works by Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Martin Puryear, and Hank Willis Thomas) and newly commissioned (including works by Bethany Collins, Abigail DeVille, and Kahlil Robert Irving), these sculptures, paintings, photographs, and videos provide a stark contrast in terms of media and meaning with the monuments and legacies of slavery.
The juxtaposition effectively puts into question an ideology and understanding of monuments that has been transforming since the 2015 Mother Emanuel AME Church killings and other racial atrocities. In the intervening years, countless Confederate memorials have been removed through public pressure, as part of the movement for racial justice. The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1903), at the threshold to the first gallery, offers an example. The winged female figure of glory holding high a laurel crown in one hand and supporting a slumped Confederate youth with the other is splashed with red paint. The wall panel reveals this gesture as an act of solidarity and a protest against the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where an extremist drove a car into counter-demonstrators, killing Heather Heyer. The rally itself was directed against the Charlottesville city council’s decision to remove Confederate monuments, which required the support of the state supreme court. The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, however, was not located in Virginia, but in Baltimore, and within a week of the protests, Baltimore had removed all of its Confederate monuments. Two additional bronzes tell similar stories.
Brilliantly, these defeated symbols are juxtaposed with Karon Davis’s newly commissioned Descendant (2025), a white plaster cast of her young son, notably standing on a high base. With soft eyes and an innocent expression, he holds out a miniature statue of John Hunt Morgan, a Confederate general and enslaver who, according to Davis’s family lore is related to them, though that remains unconfirmed by genealogical research. Significantly, Davis’s sculpture shifts the focus to her son and the future, leaving behind all aspects of the Civil War.
An American Reflection (2025), a six-minute film summary of Monument Lab’s important 2021 National Monument Audit of 48,178 public memorials in the United States, adds an important corollary to the works on view at MOCA. The presentation is succinct and engrossing, quantifying how Confederate nostalgia permeates public space, with statues dedicated to Southern leaders (many of them constructed during the Jim Crow era) greatly outnumbering those dedicated to almost anyone else. A simple map indicating locations across the country makes their ubiquity instantly visible.
Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, Courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and The Brick, the artist, and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins
In contrast to the expansive presentation at MOCA, The Brick has dedicated its space to the concentrated power of four new sculptures by Kara Walker, all derived from a Stonewall Jackson equestrian monument (1921) by Charles Keck, which was decommissioned in Charlottesville after the protests and deeded to her in 2021. When Hamza Walker first approached the artist to join the project, he explained that “Something exists for a framing in thinking about this in the contemporary art context—and that’s you.”
At the center of Walker’s installation is Unmanned Drone (2023), a work as complex in meaning as it is in composition. “It’s a relic,” she says, “as well as a correction of its original intention as a Confederate ideal.” The original statue showed the assured Southern general in battle, fighting for the South’s Lost Cause—the pervasive myth that the Civil War was fought to defend states’ rights and not, as historical scholarship has repeatedly shown, to defend the right to own slaves. The Jackson statue, along with the other decommissioned monuments shown at MOCA and those that remain in public space, was designed to perpetuate that myth. Kara Walker, discussing her work with Hamza Walker last year, asked, “Where does it begin to take on a new life that embodies this question of its use value as a monument, as a holder of White Supremacist desire, as a relic of the Lost Cause? It’s holding all of these ideas that don’t work in the republic that we live in.”
Walker’s thoughtful process of deconstructing and radically reconstructing the Jackson monument renders the general and his horse incapable of fighting for those ideas. Walker ends the myth behind the Jackson monument by removing any power and “use value.” For her, Unmanned Drone is “a ghost on the battlefield.” Her process is fully shown in four vitrines, which document the historical context of the Lost Cause, the Charlottesville protests, the city’s lengthy decision-making process and legal issues in decommissioning the Jackson monument, and two years of her drawings and artistic notes on the monument’s reconstruction.
Walker’s other three sculptures are made from the original base of the Jackson monument, the smooth granite sandblasted to a rough finish and smoothly lithochrome-painted with her signature silhouettes. Star Spangled (2023) juxtaposes opposing flag symbols, such as Texas’s five-point stars and Juneteenth’s flurry of freedom stars; in Ghost (2023), a lithe Black woman is painted in flowing, quiet lines; and Tread (2023) depicts a multi-headed Hydra ready to spar. Each reworking reverses the original intention of the base, shifting not only imagery, but also language; the phrase “The Valley Campaign,” for example, becomes “Heal Ya Pain.”
Walker, like the other contemporary artists featured in “MONUMENTS,” has transformed intentions. Though the exhibition has no travel itinerary—Ann Goldstein, interim director of MOCA, cited the weight of the monuments, which reach 15,000 pounds, as a deterrent—its questioning of what is and isn’t worthy of monumental treatment transcends any single location.
