Monuments

Situated primarily in The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in the heart of Los Angeles, MONUMENTS brought together a selection of post-Civil War Confederate statues juxtaposed with commissioned and loaned contemporary artworks. The expansive warehouse, once a police garage, was transformed into a space of reflection, resilience, and a reminder of monuments’ function as symbols of white supremacy. Statues in the exhibition, like those of Confederate president Jefferson Davis or Confederate general Robert E. Lee, are some of nearly 200 monuments taken down in recent years. However, 700 Confederate monuments still stand in public spaces across the US.

The deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in which a self-identified white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35 people, was sparked by the imminent removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, North Carolina. This event, and the 2015 killing of South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney and 8 other Black church-goers, inspired Hamza Walker and Kara Walker, co-curators, to debate the historical merit of these objects.

The first work in view as one descended the walkway is graffiti on granite fragments of the base of Robert. E. Lee’s monument in Richmond, Virginia, with phrases like “black trans women”, “do better”, and “BLM” tagged upon the stone. MONUMENTS had been in the works for nearly a decade, marred by legal and civil disputes on the decommissioning and defacing of Confederate monuments. The intent of the exhibition was to foster a wider dialogue on the ongoing historical ramifications of the Civil War and the deeply entrenched racial hierarchy in American cultural memory.

Kara Walker, Unmanned Drone, 2023. Photo by Ruben Diaz

The main anchoring work is Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone, (pictured left) on view separately at the Brick in Los Angeles. A literal butchering of a “Stonewall” Jackson bronze which stood alongside the Lee in Charlottesville, the decapitated rider and horse are conjoined in Frankenstein-like fashion, an implied zombification of the Confederate cause.

Returning to the Geffen Contemporary, a variety of works populated the galleries, with nearly no room lacking a Confederate monument, either melted down (in the case of Charlottesville’s Lee), vandalized (Richmond’s Jefferson Davis, toppled and doused in pink paint), or simply unmarred. Video works like Stan Douglas’ Birth of a Nation presented alcoves of solemnity, while traditional works such as Walter Price’s abstract Cadence series or Karon Davis’ plaster sculpture of her son, Descendant, interrogate the monuments that stood alongside.

Walter Price, Cadence, 2022-2024. Photos by Perspectives Team

Karon Davis, Descendant, 2025. Photo by Perspectives Team

John Henry, Stranger Fruit, 2025. Photo by Perspectives Team

MONUMENTS also relied on documentary-style photography to counter government-sanctioned narratives. Jon Henry’s Stranger Fruit series positioned Black mothers cradling their limp children like the Virgin Mary, taken in response to the continued murders of black men across the nation by police violence.

In contrast, Nona Faustine’s White Shoe series places a nude Black woman in eponymous white heels and a powerful stance at modern-day New York locations where slave markets once stood.

Finally, Cauleen Smith’s the Warden places the allegorical symbol of the Confederate Lost Cause, the Vindicatrix statue depicting a woman holding her finger aloft in rebuke towards history with the slogan Deo Vindice (“God will avenge”) at her feet, facing away into a corner. A video camera films her raised finger, and screens projecting the image appear throughout the gallery, almost as if to warn that we must keep the Lost Cause under strict watch.

Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series, 2021. Photos by Perspectives Team

Installation view of MONUMENTS, October 23, 2025–May 3, 2026 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and The Brick. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen.

MONUMENTS also questioned what is not memorialized. Recently uncovered silver-plate photographs by Hugh Mangum, a Black photographer from the early 1900s, depict Black men, women, and children in dignified poses, facing monuments erected in their lifetimes, powerful and ghostly portraits only discovered a generation after his death.

Bethany Collins repurposes the granite base of Charlottesville’s Stonewall Jackson into tiny rose petals in Love is dangerous, commemorating the very first Memorial Day in 1865, when the Black freedmen of Charleston visited a mass grave of Union soldiers at a former Confederate prison camp to give them a proper burial, an event largely forgotten until an archival discovery. Beside it, Kahlil Robert Irving’s New Nation (States) Battle of Manassas - 2014 presents cast-bronze miniature models of Ferguson, Missouri, depicting the militarization of the city after protests resulting from the police killing of Michael Brown.

After eight years of planning, MONUMENTS is a sobering reminder of America’s intertwined history of white supremacy and memorialization. Though difficult and emotional at times, MONUMENTS asks the public to view these Confederate statues directly and not to shy away from them, as reckoning with our past may push us towards a more just future.

Joel Gonzalez

Monument of Jefferson Davis, by Edward Valentine, 1907

New Nation (States) Battle of Manassas

Khalil Robert Irving, 2024

Number 363

Leonardo Drew, 2023