In 2021, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, finally removed the Confederate statues that had inspired a series of violent and eventually deadly white supremacist rallies in 2017.
The statue of Robert E Lee, which had been surrounded by white men with torches in a famous far-right propaganda image, was melted down. But the statue of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, which stood at the heart of a 2017 Ku Klux Klan rally, was given to a California-based arts non-profit, which pledged to use it for “transformation, not further veneration”.
Today, that same Jackson equestrian statue, chopped apart and reconstructed by American artist Kara Walker, is in Los Angeles, the centerpiece of a new art exhibit reckoning with the US’s white supremacist monuments.
The Robert E Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 6 July 2018. Photograph: Michael S Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Walker is famous for making art that grapples with racist images and archetypes, from her cavorting mock-historical silhouettes of plantation scenes, to the shark-filled fountain she erected in the Tate Modern as a monument to the British slave trade. Her work made her the obvious choice for transforming a prominent Confederate statue weighted with many decades of violent history
For the new exhibit, Jackson and his horse have been cut into pieces – “butchered”, in the words of co-curator Hamza Walker, into shank and round and rump – and then put back together to form a disjointed monster. The beast-man rears into the air, spare limbs flailing. Each detail is disturbing: the rider’s legs dangle backwards, with broken toes. His faceless head is perched on the beast’s snout. A clenched fist has tumbled to the ground.
The remade Jackson statue, titled Unmanned Drone, is a monument to the “horror”, rather than the myths, of American white supremacy, said Hamza Walker, the Los Angeles curator who has spent much of the past decade working to collect Confederate monuments that American cities have decided to remove. (Walker the artist and Walker the curator are not related.)
This toppled statue of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America, was made by sculptor Edward Valentine in 1907 and once stood on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Since being removed, it has been displayed in several museums in this fallen-down position, including at Richmond’s Valentine Museum. Photograph: Lois Beckett/The Guardian
A selection of these historic monuments to white power – some in pristine condition, some displayed spattered with paint or toppled on their sides, one reduced to a pile of bronze bars – will be on view in Los Angeles through May. The sweeping exhibition, which opens 23 October, couples the century-old statues with contemporary artworks, many by Black artists. Most of the Monuments exhibit is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca), while Unmanned Drone stands alone at the Brick, the non-profit gallery that Hamza Walker leads.
“There’s a healing aspect to doing this show, I think,” Kara Walker said Thursday at a preview for the exhibit. The violent political battles over the monuments showed “they do contain some kind of power”.
It was a “vital medicine”, she said, to have the monuments “removed from their pedestals and taken out of context and placed in a space in conversation with work by artists” whose very existence challenged white supremacy, and who had to overcome “the distractions of having to be erased and racialized in this country” in order to make their work.
The statue of Gen Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson in Charlottesville on 1 August 2018. Made by sculptor Charles Keck, it was erected in 1921. Photograph: Pat Jarrett/The Guardian
At a time of violent white backlash in the United States, the old monuments make for unsettling viewing. These Confederates may be confined to a museum, but their ideological descendants are still very much on the march, working to ban the teaching of Black history, forcing Black leaders out of power and dismantling the Voting Rights Act.
“It’s strange. It’s a very strange show,” Bennett Simpson, a senior curator at Moca and one of the show’s co-curators, said, when asked what it was like to spend so much time with Confederate monuments. “There’s a lot of beauty in it, but it’s heavy. It deals with real shit that people don’t often really want to deal with.”
‘Recontextualized in an artistic exhibit’
Many of the decommissioned Confederate monuments on view at Moca are massive, originally designed to sit atop stone pedestals and be viewed from below. Even placed directly on an art gallery floor, they loom.
Near the entrance to the exhibit, a statue of two idealized white figures from Baltimore, Maryland, is displayed in its post-protest condition, spattered with blood-red paint. The face of Matthew Fontaine Maury, a commander in the Confederate navy, has been spray-painted to look like a clown, his face now grinning like the Joker’s.
A piece of granite that once formed the base of the Robert E Lee monument in Charlottesville has been graffitied with the line: “As white supremacy crumbles.” Next to the stone fragment are two tidy piles of bronze ingots and some containers of charcoal and other debris, all that remains of the monument after it was quietly melted down in 2023.
To see these fraught Confederate objects “recontextualized within the context of an artistic exhibit” … “it takes away some of that power to harm”, said Jalane Schmidt, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, and one of the longtime Charlottesville activists who campaigned to have the statues removed.
This 1929 monument to Confederate naval commander Matthew Fontaine Maury, made by Frederick William Sievers, was removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Photograph: Lois Beckett/The Guardian
The bronze ingots from the Lee statue have been stamped with a Biblical reference, “Swords into Ploughshares”, the name of the Charlottesville group now working with a handful of finalists on proposals for a new artwork to be made out of the old bronze. The goal, Schmidt said, is to choose an artist “who can craft public art for us that turns the hurt and the harm into healing and wholeness”.
The Monuments exhibit offers a huge range of styles and approaches that engage with the history of white supremacy, from Andres Serrano’s intimate 1990 photographs of Ku Klux Klan members, to a short film by Julie Dash featuring opera singer Davóne Tines, to Nona Faustine’s gripping series of self-portraits as a Black woman standing at key sites of the slave trade in New York City.
In one gallery, a gigantic pair of Confederate statues from Baltimore stands next to a sculpture from Hank Willis Thomas: an upright Dodge Charger painted like the “General Lee”, the Confederate-themed car that appeared in the 80s television comedy The Dukes of Hazzard.
Hank Willis Thomas’s A Suspension of Hostilities (2019) references the Confederate-themed car in the hit 80s TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, and the many ways Confederate imagery remains in American popular culture, sometimes in playful or comedic forms. Photograph: Lois Beckett/The Guardian
In another, Kahlil Robert Irving, a young artist who works in St Louis, offers a meticulous bronze replica of the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, where protests erupted after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by a white police officer in 2014.
One of the most powerful rooms features Jon Henry’s series of photographs of Black mothers cradling their still-living sons as if they were already dead. Across from Henry’s photographs, which were taken in neighborhoods across the country in years marked by police killings of Black men and boys, is a 1917 sculpture of a larger-than-life white woman cradling a Confederate soldier, which was sponsored in part by the Daughters of the Confederacy, a political group that still has active chapters.
Between those works is Karon Davis’s sculpture of her son, Moses, holding a tiny sculpture of a Confederate general by the tail of his horse. One of the inspirations for Descendants was Davis being told that her own Black family is descended from a Confederate general and enslaver, John Hunt Morgan.
As of 2024, four out of five Confederate monuments in the United States remain in public spaces, according to Monument Lab, a non-profit that published a 2021 audit of nearly 50,000 public monuments in the US.
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Collecting Confederate monuments
The idea for the Monuments exhibit started eight years ago, in the fall of 2017, just months after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, said Hamza Walker, the Brick curator. He and his collaborators began approaching cities that were taking down their Confederate monuments about acquiring them for an art exhibit. In the first few years, this work went slowly, he said: only 35 or 40 Confederate statues had come down.
Then came the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, sparked by the cell phone recording of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which resulted in another 150 US statues being removed, Hamza Walker said. In England, protesters toppled a monument to British enslaver Edward Colston and dumped it into the sea.
Walker said the exhibit organizers ultimately sent out 68 requests to obtain decommissioned Confederate monuments across the US, and heard back from about two dozen locations.
Of all the monuments Walker’s group was able to obtain, Charlottesville’s Lee and Jackson statues are perhaps the most charged – symbolic not only of historic violence, but of very recent white supremacist attacks.
The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on 11 August 2017. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Like many Confederate monuments, Charlottesville’s stately Beaux Arts sculptures of Jackson and Lee were not actually products of the post-civil war mourning, but were erected a half century later, at the height of Jim Crow segregation in the south, when Black citizens were blocked from voting or serving in government, and romanticized images of Confederate leaders were created as enduring symbols of white political power.
The land where Jackson’s statue was erected in 1921 had once been a majority Black and mixed-race neighborhood that the city razed, replacing it with a whites-only park.
Kara Walker said her title for the remade sculpture, Unmanned Drone, plays in part on the idea of “the sculpture in its original form as a weapon of Jim Crow”.
To remake an 8,900lb bronze monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, artist Kara Walker worked with a 3D digital rendering to experiment with potential cuts and configurations, since the bronze was too heavy to manipulate by hand. Photograph: Ruben Diaz/Courtesy of the Brick
In 2016, a local Charlottesville high school student, Zyahna Bryant, started a petition calling on the city government to remove the Lee statue standing in one of the city’s manicured greens. When the city government voted in favor of removing it in 2017, a range of white nationalist and neo-Nazi activists seized on the small-town controversy as a rallying point, staging months of pro-Confederate monument demonstrations and provocations that terrorized local residents.
At the Unite the Right rally in August 2017, a self-described neo-Nazi rammed a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, leaving many people injured and 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead. For months afterwards, the city covered the Lee and Jackson statues with black tarps, in an eerie sign of mourning. Then a judge ordered the tarps removed.
In 2021, after years of legal battles, both statues were finally taken down from their pedestals and hauled away to storage, and Charlottesville’s city council put out a request for proposals from organizations interested in obtaining the old monuments. Among the offers they received were one from a statuary park in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and one from a private citizen in Utopia, Texas. The Lee statue went to a local museum, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which had proposed melting it down. The city council voted to give Jackson to Hamza Walker’s Los Angeles-based arts organization, with Kara Walker already on board to transform the work.
Remaking an 8,900lb bronze monument came with plenty of logistical challenges. “I can give you a whole arsenal of cranes and lifts,” Hamza Walker said. The statue’s granite base weighed so many tons in total, he said, that it had to be transported on two flatbed trucks.
Artist Karon Davis used her son, Moses, as the model for this sculpture of a young Black man holding a statue of a Confederate general by his horse’s tail. Descendants (2025) references the possible family connection between Walker and Confederate general and enslaver John Hunt Morgan. Photograph: Lois Beckett/The Guardian
To help model how she wanted to transform the statue, Kara Walker worked with fabricator Mike Koller to make a 3D digital scan of the statue that allowed her to visualize potential configurations. “When you’re working in space with these heavy objects, it’s not just like picking it up and hovering and holding it,” she said.
When the Jackson statue was finally transported to a foundry to be cut into its predetermined pieces, the 12ft 9in figure was too tall to fit through the foundry’s door, which was only about 11ft tall. That meant the fabricators were forced to cut off Jackson’s head to get the statue inside. That “wasn’t for dramatic effect”, curator Hamza Walker said. “But it had a dramatic effect, in a way that was unanticipated,” Kara Walker said. “You know, the violence of it.”
At the Brick, Unmanned Drone is accompanied by historical documents and a selection of Kara Walker’s early drawings and notes about the statue.
There are sketches of a Black woman riding backwards on Jackson’s horse, sometimes facing his boot, other times his body. There are scribbled questions: “Who heals a wound that continually opens itself?” “How many things can you do with bones?”
The final form of her Jackson statue is much simpler than the early drawings, distilled into a single bristling form.
The familiar bronze parts of the Confederate hero have been restructured “into something that wholly defies the original intention of the object”, said Andrea Douglas, the executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. As an art historian who had lived and worked around the original statue for years, she called it “a little breathtaking”.
