MONUMENTS at MOCA and The Brick

Kara Walker, Unmanned Drone (installation view) (2023). The Brick, 2025. Bronze statue made from Charles Keck’s 1921 statue of Stonewall Jackson, which stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was decommissioned in 2021, 156 × 132 × 56 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

In her 2021 essay collection On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Maggie Nelson, à la Michel Foucault, expresses skepticism that a momentary act of resistance can produce everlasting change. Rather, Nelson argues that structural change ultimately comes from everyday practices of self-creation incessantly contesting the powers that be. Nelson’s lucid dissection of the limits and conditions of aesthetic and political freedom feels particularly poignant five years later in our current context, where American museums are increasingly under attack by the Trump administration. MONUMENTS—a sprawling exhibition co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Brick that examines the racialized history of monument construction in the United States through juxtaposing 19 artist commissions with decommissioned American monuments—contests similar concerns regarding who controls history and consequently our senses of freedom. Particularly, the exhibition asks whether, when racist monuments are torn down, this act repairs historical injustice and its amnesia or merely performs a symbolic gesture while political violence and disenfranchisement persist.

Curated by Hamza Walker of MOCA, Bennett Simpson of The Brick, and artist Kara Walker, the show manages to reposition decommissioned monuments associated with Confederate history as tragicomic parodies of the times they represent. Stripped from their original contexts (most of these statues were decommissioned during the first Trump presidency), sullied with graffiti and paint by protesters, and confined to stark galleries at MOCA Geffen, these monuments appear melancholic or burdened by historical guilt.¹ Such is the case for Josephus Daniels (1985), Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1903), Matthew Fontaine Maury (1929), and Jefferson Davis (1907): no longer elevated, sometimes sidelined or lying on the museum floor, appearing like out-of-step, worn down relics, appendices to contemporary works included in the exhibition. The exhibition’s scenography ensures that these monuments, divorced from oppressive power dynamics, become instrumentalized raw materials for contemporary artists to analyze, rework, and respond to. In many ways, newer works in the exhibition act as counter-monuments to the “official” histories that monuments represent. This juxtaposition reveals not only the radical fragility of freedom, but also points to the fact that freedom, like art objects, requires constant maintenance, while also having the potential to gain new life through reinterpretation.

Among the commissions that respond to the memory culture associated with Confederate monuments and the myth of the Lost Cause,² works that deliberately sidestep the authoritarian grammar of the monument felt most compelling. Bethany Collins’s Love is dangerous (2024–25) is a work about the story of the first Memorial Day—Collins traced the origins of Memorial Day celebrations back to formerly enslaved Black people in Charleston, South Carolina, and the work reveals how the joy of liberation can easily be corrupted by vapid commercialization.³ Consisting of a carved stone slab and stone rose petals, Love is dangerous is made from the appropriated granite base of a decommissioned Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson equestrian statue previously installed in Charlottesville, Virginia.⁴ Collins’s quiet work, scattered and lying flat as if left to decay, declines domination’s language. Instead, it posits that despite the best efforts of historical and political amnesia, remnants of repressed liberatory stories await rediscovery.

Walter Price’s Cadence series (2022–24), set in the same room as the Matthew Fontaine Maury statue, are laboriously rendered oceanic landscape paintings. The embodied, heavily textured marks—partially made by the artist walking on his canvases—boasts an exuberant, vitalistic palette of orange, red, saturated green, and deep blue. The paintings are invested in the artist’s experience in the Navy. Though, as if in rebuff to Maury, a Confederate naval officer considered to be a founder of oceanography, his work refuses to inherit the military’s traumatic histories of segregation and racist and imperialistic violence, deploying abstraction toward canceling out militaristic visual language.

Other artists forego abstraction, appropriating Confederate statues to warp and decontextualize their meaning. Cauleen Smith’s enticing The Warden (2025) employs a CCTV surveillance camera to zoom into—and interact with—the original Vindicatrix (1907) statue (nicknamed Miss Confederacy), which was removed from the top of the Jefferson Davis Monument in Richmond, Virginia in 2020.⁵ The sculpture is installed in a back corner of the museum, lit with menacing lighting and set within a black reflective backdrop. The CCTV camera zooms in on the statue’s arm, positioned with an upward-pointing finger, and the footage is then relayed on live feed video that appears on several monitors throughout the exhibition. Flattening the statue’s message of harm into abstract flows of data, Smith turns the visual language of surveillance, often deployed in racist policing, against itself. Rather than toppling violent monuments, the artist speculates an emergent language of technology that is capable of altering and revising, in real time, the revisionist narratives embedded in Confederate monuments.

The exhibition’s high note is Unmanned Drone (2023) by Kara Walker, the sole artist exhibited at The Brick. The work is a monumental sculpture made from splintering and reassembling parts of Charles Keck’s 1921 equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson (the same statue that Collins used a fragment from). Walker and the rest of the curatorial team acquired this monument from the city council of Charlottesville, which solicited proposals for reconfiguring decommissioned statues in ways that do not venerate their toxicity.⁶ In Walker’s version, the sculpture is a headless horseman, overwrought with exhaustion, on the edge of failure, and unable to shoulder the unfinished business of history. Eerily devotional and desirous, no longer heroic, the sculpture is a fitting metaphor for how official memory culture can also be overturned by the symbolic violence it enforces. Overcoming the prescriptive tendency of monuments, Unmanned Drone is a durable redress for repair, alive, revisable, and responsive.

If the freedoms we aspire to always already harbor seeds of contradiction, particularly manifested in how hegemonic and oppositional cultures marshal remembrance, amnesia, and speculation against each other, then the question of MONUMENTS is how to erect counter-monuments that respond to the turmoil of unresolved history. True freedom is responding to new conditions, revising definitions, practices, and aesthetic histories whenever necessary.

Cauleen Smith, The Warden (installation view) (2025). CCTV camera, single-channel live feed video, dimensions variable. Edward V. Valentine, Vindicatrix (from Jefferson Davis Monument) (1907). Bronze, 112 × 40 × 36 inches. Image courtesy of the artists, Morán Morán, Black History Museum, and Cultural Center of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.