LOS ANGELES — “Someday,” Confederate sympathizer and sculptor Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl once remarked, “I will make a monument that will express the verdict of history.”
The quotation appears alongside Ruckstuhl’s 1903 work, “Confederate Soldiers and Sailors,” in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) and arts nonprofit The Brick’s long-awaited exhibition, MONUMENTS. The two-part show displays decommissioned public Confederate statues — Ruckstuhl’s, now splattered in red paint by protesters, was toppled in 2017 following Charlottesville’s violent Unite the Right rally — alongside (or within) commissions by contemporary artists and other selected artworks.
Ruckstuhl’s phrase reflects the problematic double bind of early 20th-century Lost Cause mythology, a belief system that downplayed slavery’s importance in the Civil War, both anticipating and deferring the Confederacy’s vindication. It also provides an oddly apt framing for the exhibition itself, which expertly captures America’s shifting political terrain and the role of art within it. Originally planned for the end of Biden’s first (and, likely, only) term, the exhibition once seemed poised to mark a national reckoning with slavery’s legacy. Instead, due to institutional logistics and security concerns, it arrives during Trump’s second, when several Confederate monuments have already been reinstated. Fittingly, MONUMENTS evokes a world where historical verdicts, especially noble ones, remain out of reach — but, through poetic, thoughtful installation, chief curators Bennett Simpson, Hamza Walker, and Kara Walker manage to find life in limbo.
Installation view of Abigail DeVille, “Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet)” (2025), china cabinets, charcoal, rusted steel scaffolding, pig blood, salt, mud, lights, and natural fiber
Artful pairings negotiate the exhibition’s difficult premise with ease, neither inadvertently valorizing Confederate history nor tritely dismissing slavery’s ongoing legacy. A single immersive installation by Abigail DeVille dominates the exhibition’s only second-floor gallery: “Deo Vindice (Death’s Cabinet)” (2025) features a sweeping array of charred colonial cabinets and furniture, their eerie assemblage inspired by images of burned homes in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War. In the bunker-like first-floor room directly below plays Julie Dash and Davóne Tines’s music video project “HOMEGOING” (2025). Filmed partially in Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, where White supremacist Dylann Roof shot nine Black parishioners in 2015, the video cuts between scenes of the present-day church, where Tines and Black activists perform the gospel song “This Little Light of Mine,” and shots of Charleston’s 400-year-old Angel Oak Tree, a landmark older than the country itself. When seen with DeVille’s scorched sculpture above, the “light” of “HOMEGOING” seems abundantly powerful — even fiery — and almost unbearably tragic, as though American history were collapsing in one explosive space.
Nearby galleries stage similarly insightful collisions, this time between decommissioned monuments and contemporary artworks. One room adjacent to Tines and Dash’s film displays selections from Andres Serrano’s 1990 photo series The Klan, in which Ku Klux Klan members pose against dark backdrops, simultaneously illuminated through bright flash and obscured by their hooded uniforms. In the same room, Edward V. Valentine’s 1907 sculpture of Confederate president Jefferson Davis lies on its side, dripping in pink paint. Together, these artworks explore the complex visibility and persistence of White supremacy — but here, its symbols feel newly exposed and vulnerable, too. In another pairing, Laura Gardin Fraser’s hulking 1948 monument of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson faces Hank Willis Thomas’s “A Suspension of Hostilities” (2019), in which a towering replica of “General Lee” — the bright orange, Confederate-flag-emblazoned Dodge Charger from the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard — is flipped downward, colliding headfirst with the museum floor.
Installation view of Monuments
Installation view of Edward V. Valentine, “Jefferson Davis” (1907), bronze
What does the Confederacy’s present look like? Several miles from MOCA, The Brick displays Kara Walker’s standout “Unmanned Drone” (2023), a deconstruction and reassembly of Charles Keck’s 1921 equestrian monument to Stonewall Jackson. The resulting artwork is a surreal hybrid of horse and rider — an amalgam of armor, limbs, and weapons — as though time has reshuffled the monument’s original structure into an even more grotesque, inhuman fighter. (The title references contemporary autonomous warcraft, which have been used in Russia, Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere.) In Cauleen Smith’s sprawling multimedia installation “The Warden” (2025), the “Vindicatrix,” a female statue that once stood atop Richmond’s Jefferson Davis monument, faces a black gallery corner. A CCTV camera points at her outstretched hand, a gesture that, in Lost Cause mythology, signifies the Confederacy’s eventual reprisal. The camera livestreams her pointing finger onto TVs scattered across the exhibition, where they implicate the viewer in the Vindicatrix’s quest: These ominous hands appear, at first glance, almost like wayfinding markers, guiding the viewer through entryways and corridors.
Just inside MOCA’s doors is a metal detector flanked by two guards. Though it’s not an official artwork in the exhibition, it may as well be — the heightened security for the exhibition serves as a bracing reminder of how the material on view may still embolden White supremacists today. Luckily, this project also empowers artists. Near the entrance are piles of bronze ingot bars melted from Robert E. Lee’s Charlottesville monument, stacked like gold at a bank, alongside slag and a granite fragment from the monument. Their weighty presence speaks volumes about America’s economic foundation in slavery — but an accompanying text notes that what’s on view is only the material for a future artwork, and not the piece itself. Later, these relics will play a role in another new commission. History, after all, hasn’t reached its verdict yet.
Installation view of Monuments, featuring a monument by Frederick William Sievers in the foreground
Installation view of Monuments featuring works by Laura Gardin Fraser (left) and Hank Willis Thomas (right)
MONUMENTS continues at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (152 North Central Ave, Los Angeles) and The Brick (518 North Western Avenue, Los Angeles) through May 3, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Hamza Walker, Bennett Simpson, and Kara Walker, with Hannah Burstein and Paula Kroll.
