In 2017, town of Charlottesville, Virginia, voted to take away an unlimited bronze statue of the Accomplice basic Robert E. Lee—the results of a national reckoning with the legacy of slavery within the US. The choice led to a violent rally dubbed Unite the Proper, the place white supremacists (together with Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen) descended on the downtown park the place the monument stood, terrorising antiracist counter-protesters. The conflict left one lady useless and plenty of others injured. Throughout a press convention following the lethal occasion, US president Donald Trump advised reporters that there have been “very advantageous folks on each side”, a remark that shocked the nation—together with Hamza Walker, the director of the Brick in Los Angeles.
“That second, and the chain of occasions instantly following, when one other 25 to 30 monuments got here down, prompted the thought for the present,” Walker tells The Artwork Newspaper of the brand new exhibition Monuments, which opens on 23 October in Los Angeles. “It was an enormous occasion each socio-politically and culturally; these monuments are artworks and, as curators, that falls in our area.” In 2019, Walker approached the Museum of Modern Artwork, Los Angeles (Moca) with the idea. The museum’s management, together with the senior curator Bennett Simpson, jumped on board.
Six years later, Monuments—co-curated by Walker, Simpson and the artist Kara Walker—takes place at each Moca and the Brick. The exhibition locations decommissioned monuments borrowed from quite a few Southern municipalities, together with Charlottesville, in dialogue with a collection of present and newly commissioned up to date artistic endeavors. “These monuments have so many tales to inform,” Simpson says. “There’s lots about American historical past that may be realized from contemplating them.”
Of the almost 20 monuments represented within the exhibition, some are in fragments or closely vandalised, whereas others stay intact and unmarred. A majority honour Accomplice troopers and outstanding supporters of slavery. Amongst them is a bronze of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Accomplice States of America, splattered in scarlet paint and brought from a a lot bigger monument. The Lee memorial on the centre of the Unite the Proper rally can also be on show in its present decommissioned kind: a pile of bronze ingots left over after the sculpture was melted down in 2023. The Matthew Fontaine Maury Globe, the most important work within the exhibition, is a colossal orb encircled by a storm representing a Accomplice naval officer’s contributions to the sector of oceanography.
Nona Faustine’s On This Spit Of Land Massa and I Reside, Dutch Reform Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY (2013) Courtesy the Property of Nona Faustine and Larger Photos
The up to date works on view embody pictures, portray, video and sculpture by artists corresponding to Leonardo Drew, Martin Puryear and the late Nona Faustine. The up to date works will not be proposals for brand spanking new monuments; reasonably, they perform extra as counter-monuments that usually undertake the “language of monuments” to critique them, based on the present’s curators.
The artist Kahlil Robert Irving, for instance, used bronze—a cloth generally reserved for monuments resulting from its grandeur and sturdiness—to grasp a rendering of Ferguson, Missouri, the place the 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by the police officer Darren Wilson in 2014. “There are essential elements of our previous which might be a lot nearer than we expect,” says Irving, who is predicated in close by St Louis. He says that his work, New Nation (States) Battle of Manassas—2014 (2024-25), goals to “join historic situations of violence pushed by white-supremacist ideologies to this present second of violence and illegibility”.
In the meantime, the artist Bethany Collins repurposed supplies straight from a dismantled monument, remodeling granite initially used for a Accomplice tribute right into a memorial honouring Black girls in her sculpture Love is harmful (2024-25).
And Walter Value’s new sequence of work responds on to the Matthew Fontaine Maury Globe. He created six vibrant Cadence work primarily utilizing his toes, a reference to each the marching drills he participated in whereas within the army and to the leg damage Maury sustained throughout his service as a naval officer. “As a result of the present offers with the historical past of slavery and compelled labour, I used to be motivated to make these work utilizing minimal effort,” Value says. The lyrical acrylic-and-gesso abstractions—in vibrant shades of cobalt, teal and tangerine—provide a visible, if not conceptual, reprieve from the solemnity of metallic and stone.
Walter Value’s Pond de Rivaaahh (2023) Photograph: Elisabeth Bernstein, courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
“A few of the works are bullseyes, confronting the theme straight on,” Walker says of the up to date items on view. “Others have a extra indirect however complementary connection that’s initially extra refined or nuanced.”
Whereas Value’s work may serve for instance of a quieter method, Hank Willis Thomas’s A Suspension of Hostilities (2019)—that includes a 1969 Dodge Charger styled after one on the sequence The Dukes of Hazzard, emblazoned with a Accomplice flag and the phrases “Normal Lee”, and smashed nose-first into the bottom—exemplifies a extra aggressive and specific confrontation with the symbols and legacies problematised by the exhibition.
In gentle of the present political local weather within the US, together with assaults on museums charged with preserving the nation’s historical past—each the honourable and the horrific—Monuments has an particularly pressing really feel to it. But each Walker and Simpson encourage viewers to think about the formidable present as a response to the previous decade versus the current second, even because it addresses right this moment’s most urgent points. Their hopes stay the identical as they have been in 2019: to historicise, stir curiosity and foster dialogue.
“Sure, this present will mark a number of the dangerous occasions of the previous,” Irving says. “However this isn’t about pointing fingers as a lot because it’s about coming collectively, studying, rising and making this a spot higher for all of us.”
Monuments, the Brick and Museum of Modern Artwork, Los Angeles, 23 October-3 Might 2026
