Poisonous Objects

Perhaps the most unsettling monsters are those that are somewhat human. Zombies. Headless horsemen. The deadly Sirens of Greek myth. In Mapuche Indigenous lore of the southern Andes there’s the imbunche—a human infant who, over time, is transformed into a grotesquerie by malevolent brujos, or sorcerers. Its head is rotated backward, its tongue split in two, and one of its legs is folded behind its back and attached to the nape of its neck. The imbunche moves forward, crawling about on its available limbs, but always looks back. It’s a creature that haunts the imaginations of South American children, and the region’s art and literature. And it emerged whole from the recesses of my childhood nightmares this past fall as I stood before Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone at the Los Angeles exhibition space the Brick.

More than eleven feet tall, this uncanny sculpture is as much a work of inventive deformation as it is a feat of creativity. Unmanned Drone began life as a bronze equestrian monument to the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that commanded a public plaza in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a century until it was decommissioned in 2021. One of the countless Confederate monuments that sprang up around the South during the era of Jim Crow, its ceremonious unveiling featured a parade of five thousand people, including Confederate veterans as well as a troupe of public school students who formed a “living” Confederate flag. The monument showed Jackson riding determinedly into battle, and it was created by the noted sculptor Charles Keck, an artist with a knack for producing heroic figures that retained an air of naturalism. An article published in The New York Times before its installation in 1921 predicted that “it will rank as the best figure of that celebrated warrior in the country.” That celebrated warrior has now been transformed into an aberrant chimera.

Walker is perhaps best known for her paper silhouettes dramatizing the depredations of slavery, but she has also worked at monumental scales. In 2014, at the old Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn she built a colossal sugar sphinx modeled on a Black woman, a mighty symbol of the slave labor that for centuries fed the global sweet tooth.¹ Now, with the aid of a plasma cutter, the artist has sliced up a monument that venerated Jackson and reassembled it into something ghastly. A cluster of horse legs supports a figure that, like an imbunche, appears both human and not. From a horse’s thigh sprouts an arm dragging a saber. A man’s leg dangles off a horse’s rump. In lieu of a head, some sort of extremity—it’s unclear whether human or equine—punctures a faceless skull. From a distance, it might seem as if the beast were rearing up to attack. But move closer and it becomes clear that it blunders about blindly, hobbled by body parts that face both forward and back. An imbunche is typically a person rendered monstrous by outside forces. Walker’s surgical reimagination of the Jackson statue instead dismantles the pleasing aesthetics of white supremacy to reveal the ugliness within: the disfiguring myth of the Lost Cause, which has papered over the racist cornerstones of the Confederacy with romanticized stories about sacrifice and bravery.² “It was all horror,” Walker said in a Q&A that appears in a pamphlet about the work. “Why should it look like it was anything other than?”

Walker completed Unmanned Drone in 2023, but the sculpture only recently went on display as part of a two-part exhibition in Los Angeles titled “MONUMENTS,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the nonprofit art space the Brick. This irrationally ambitious show was curated by the Brick’s director, Hamza Walker, the MOCA senior curator Bennett Simpson, and Kara Walker (no relation to Hamza), and brings together ten decommissioned monuments (mostly Confederate) and a range of artworks (mostly contemporary) to examine and respond to the material legacy of the Lost Cause. The show’s title, with its urgent, all-caps format, makes clear that the response will be forceful and direct. The first installation that greets visitors at MOCA is fragments of the forty-foot base that once supported a major equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia—the pieces still covered in graffiti from the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. One chunk of granite bears the spray-painted command “Do better.”

“MONUMENTS” was nearly a decade in the making, and three critical events give it shape: the mass murder of nine Black parishioners by a white supremacist at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; the violent Unite the Right rally two years later, when white nationalists descended on Charlottesville to preserve a monument to Lee that was slated for removal, resulting in the death of a counterprotester; and the killing of Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, which sparked protests globally. In the aftermath of these incidents, Confederate monuments around the country were toppled, decommissioned, or quietly removed. Hamza Walker found himself struck by the fate of these objects and approached MOCA about a collaboration. “These things have come down and nobody knows what to do with them,” he told J. Wortham of The New York Times. “Do they still maintain their aura, or do they become artifacts?”

The show examines their tangled history, which began in Civil War burial grounds before migrating to more visible locations. The earliest Confederate monuments marked Confederate sections of cemeteries, often with structures inspired by ancient architecture, like a pyramid, an arch, or an obelisk. But as Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow, these once quiet markers began to grow in scale and occupy central urban areas, frequently honoring military leaders like Jackson and Lee. By focusing on them, rather than on, say, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, writes the Civil War historian Gary W. Gallagher in the essay collection The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (2000), “ex-Confederates could highlight the military rather than the far messier political and social dimensions of the war.” In 1890 the city of Richmond, the former Confederate capital, unveiled its grand equestrian statue of Lee, which reached a height of six stories and occupied a large roundabout.

The rise of Confederate monuments in the late nineteenth century owes a partial debt to the City Beautiful movement, which sought to enhance cities with improved street plans and gracious public squares. This created a demand for public art that groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which was a forceful purveyor of the Lost Cause, were more than happy to satisfy. The building boom attracted artists, architects, foundries, and quarries from all over, including the North and faraway Europe—some of whom advertised their services in magazines like Confederate Veteran. Keck was a native New Yorker who worked all the angles: as he was fabricating his statue of Stonewall Jackson, he was also producing one of the Black reformer Booker T. Washington for Tuskegee University.

Early Confederate memorial events were mournful gatherings, but by 1890 unveilings had become elaborate celebrations that involved bands, parades, and, on occasion, a sitting US president. (Woodrow Wilson, who resegregated the federal workforce, helped inaugurate a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery in 1914.) The dedicatory speeches at these events generally glossed over the war’s causes and vaguely alluded to courage and sacrifice. But slavery’s vicious legacy couldn’t always be contained. At the dedication of “Silent Sam,” a monument of a Confederate soldier erected at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1913, a Confederate veteran boasted to the audience that just a hundred yards from that spot he’d once “horsewhipped a negro wench, until her skirts hung in shreds.” In 1931 W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that an appropriate inscription for Confederate monuments would be: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.”

Confederate monuments were, in essence, warnings. “They are weapons in the larger arsenal of white supremacy, artifacts of Jim Crow not unlike the ‘whites only’ signs that declared black southerners to be second-class citizens,” writes the historian Karen L. Cox in her insightful book No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (2021). Their prominent placements made clear who held power in the segregated South, which is why it’s no coincidence that so many were installed on courthouse lawns. Keck’s monument to Jackson stood in such a square in Charlottesville. A monument to a Confederate soldier also stood—and still stands—before the Mississippi courthouse where Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted. (A poignant photograph in MOCA’s catalog shows Black spectators sitting at the base of the monument during the trial; the courtroom couldn’t contain them.)

Confederate monuments have even infiltrated the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., the literal seat of the Union. Among the statues displayed there is a bronze of Jefferson Davis by the sculptor Augustus Lukeman, who later worked on Stone Mountain, the gargantuan Confederate bas relief carved into a granite outcropping near Atlanta—a site linked to the rise of the modern Ku Klux Klan. As a teenager, Kara Walker lived in Atlanta and hung out at Stone Mountain, where she was subjected to tales of glory that somehow avoided mention of what the war was actually about.

“MONUMENTS” was originally scheduled to open in 2023, but the complicated logistics—including the shipping of so many oversize works, along with the implementation of additional security protocols—delayed the opening by two years. An exhibition about Confederate monuments, however, is never not timely. Last year the Trump administration announced the reinstallation of various Confederate artifacts that had been removed from the D.C. area, including a monument to Albert Pike, who briefly served as a general in the Confederate Army, and the towering Confederate monument at Arlington created by the sculptor Moses Ezekiel. The latter is particularly egregious; it features tropes of the nurturing “mammy” and the “faithful slave.” Trump has described Confederate monuments as “our heritage” and praised their “artistic beauty.” His romanticization of these objects, along with his ongoing suppression of Black history, recently led the writer and television host Baratunde Thurston to describe him as the “president of the Confederacy.”

Displayed in MOCA’s warehouse galleries, where they are deprived of their elevated plinths and their bucolic outdoor settings, many of these poisonous objects come off as comically overwrought; others bear evidence of uprisings. A 1917 bronze by J. Maxwell Miller in honor of the Confederate women of Maryland that once stood in Baltimore features a woman cradling a man’s limp body, with another woman in a billowing cape looking ridiculously self-important behind them. And a statue of Jefferson Davis that once lorded over Richmond’s Monument Avenue is now far less commanding. It lies on the floor, splattered in pink paint, its head smashed in, one arm raised as if pleading for help.

The exhibition is divided into two parts. At the Brick, a small kunsthalle in East Hollywood, you’ll find Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone—a special commission made from the only statue deeded to the show’s organizers. (All the others are on loan.) Also on view at the Brick are fragments of the Jackson monument’s plinth, which Walker has reworked as well. On the rear of one slab, she has etched a drawing of the Hydra bearing the heads of Confederate soldiers. Like the monster of myth, the Lost Cause requires perpetual slaying.

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the museum’s sprawling branch in Little Tokyo, houses the rest of the show, which recalls the cadence of a call-and-response. Decommissioned Confederate monuments that perhaps once stood uncontested are now challenged and subverted by works of contemporary art. Alongside Miller’s bronze paean to Confederate women stands a white fiberglass sculpture by the New York–based artist Karon Davis of her son, Moses, dangling an equestrian monument by its tail. Nearby hangs the series “Stranger Fruit,” by the New York photographer Jon Henry, which depicts Black mothers cradling their sons in the style of a pietà. These juxtapositions are blunt but effective—diminishing the mawkish narrative of noble sacrifice embedded in so much Confederate iconography.

In another gallery the toppled statue of Jefferson Davis resides near Andres Serrano’s 1990s photographic portraits of Ku Klux Klan members in their hoods—one of them bearing an insignia of the monument at Stone Mountain. The Davis statue, sculpted by Edward Valentine, a proud believer in the Lost Cause, was once part of a much larger architectural ensemble on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, which is part of a real-estate development that once catered exclusively to whites. The composition consisted of a semi-circular colonnade with a soaring sixty-five-foot column at its center that bore a bronze sculpture of a female figure titled Vindicatrix, a symbol of the “truth and justice owed to the South.” Popularly known as Miss Confederacy, she came down from her perch in 2020, when Richmond purged its city-owned Confederate monuments. At MOCA Cauleen Smith, a multimedia artist from Los Angeles, has placed Vindicatrix in a corner and trained a CCTV camera on her extended right hand, an image that is broadcast on video monitors staggered around the museum. As you move through the exhibition, the hand guides you to the dead end where Vindicatrix now stands, facing a wall. Once the surveyor, Vindicatrix is now the one who is surveilled.

The most moving installation, however, is one of the most understated, featuring the work of a little-known itinerant portrait photographer named Hugh Mangum, who worked in North Carolina and Virginia at the turn of the twentieth century. At a moment when Plessy v. Ferguson had legalized racial segregation in the United States, Mangum welcomed both Black and white subjects to his studio and photographed them with equal grace. On one wall, young men and women pose in their finest ensembles in portraits so crisp, it appears as if they might speak. Across the way are bronzes of Josephus Daniels, who used his influence as the owner of North Carolina’s News and Observer to foment the anti-Black Wilmington Massacre of 1898, and Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who famously wrote in the Dred Scott decision that Black people were not citizens and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

“MONUMENTS” is a searing, essential show. But it is not without a weak spot: its failure to make a clearer connection between its subject and the place where the exhibition is being presented. California lies at a remove from the East Coast and Civil War history, which makes it an ideal location for a display that might be too contentious anywhere else. But the state has its own links to the war and the venomous philosophies of the Lost Cause. During the conflict California was a free state and supplied volunteers and, more importantly, gold to support the Union effort. Yet Confederate iconography nevertheless took hold in the state during the twentieth century, as it did in other places that had nothing to do with the South—often as a result of the unrelenting propaganda blitz orchestrated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where entertainers like Yma Sumac and Tyrone Power are buried, had, until 2017, a monument to Confederate soldiers. Farther afield, in cities like Bakersfield and San Diego, you could find plaques for a planned though never fully built cross-country highway honoring Jefferson Davis (both since removed). And there were the countless place names across the state—such as the elementary school in Long Beach honoring Robert E. Lee (since renamed), or the hamlet outside Salinas once known as Confederate Corners (now Springtown).

More critically, Hollywood’s complicity in disseminating the myth of the Lost Cause is underexamined. Only two works in “MONUMENTS” contend in some way with LA’s most prominent industry. The first is a 2019 sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas; he crashed a Dodge Charger with a Confederate battle flag painted on its roof—a nod to the famous General Lee of television’s The Dukes of Hazzard—nose first into a base made to resemble a dirt road. The second is a multichannel video by the Canadian artist Stan Douglas, Birth of a Nation (2025), that reimagines a sequence from D.W. Griffith’s deeply racist Reconstruction epic by adding a pair of Black characters, exploring ideas about mistaken identity and social perceptions of Black people.

But these two works alone don’t articulate all the ways that Hollywood has laundered the racial violence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, frequently depicting genteel white southerners as underdogs and presenting plantation life as a magnolia-scented lark, complete with loyal slaves. In a 2015 essay for Jacobin, the scholar and film critic Eileen Jones examined the Lost Cause signifiers that permeated films about the Civil War before ultimately migrating to westerns. “The honor code of the Southern gentleman can be absorbed into and somewhat disguised by the character of the free-ranging Western hero whose past is often obscured,” she writes. “A cross-section of regional types from North and South can mix together in barrooms and on stagecoaches.”

“MONUMENTS” includes a fascinating six-minute video made by Monument Lab, a Philadelphia nonprofit that studies the state of monuments around the US. It notes that of the nearly six thousand Civil War monuments that have been built, only 1 percent mention slavery, and that there are more monuments dedicated to Robert E. Lee, who lost the war, than to Ulysses S. Grant, who won it. In film, the statistics are similarly lopsided, so it would have been instructive for the show to include a presentation on moviemaking—more people have likely seen Gone with the Wind than will ever lay eyes on a statue of Lee.

Ultimately the exhibition contests the nature of Confederate monuments rather than imagining new forms that monuments might take—although there are a couple of works that come close. The Saint Louis–based artist Kahlil Robert Irving has created a remarkable tabletop model, cast in glimmering bronze, of the incinerated streets of Ferguson, Missouri, following the 2014 uprisings in response to the police killing of Michael Brown. It’s a startling image of the battles Black people continue to fight. The other is a breathtaking video by the filmmaker Julie Dash and the bass-baritone singer Davóne Tines, titled HOMEGOING (2025), that honors the nine parishioners murdered in Charleston in 2015. The video shows the charismatic Tines and various activists singing the civil rights anthem “This Little Light of Mine” at Mother Emanuel, as well as a four-hundred-year-old oak outside Charleston that has witnessed the breadth of US history. The song’s arrangement is both uplifting and funereal, with stark instrumentation and a pounding drum. The entire piece speaks to the ways that memory is held not just in monuments but in the walls of churches, in trees, in lyrics that are passed from one generation to the next.

Where “MONUMENTS” leaves off, however, an engrossing series of installations by Tavares Strachan picks up. “The Day Tomorrow Began,” the Bahamas-born artist’s solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), is not concerned exclusively with public monuments. It is a series of meticulously conceived environments that reveal the artist’s preoccupation with systems of knowledge and the transmission of information—through channels esteemed by the West (printed matter) and traditions more common to other cultures (oral history). One room features The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018), a behemoth, two-thousand-page book compiled by the artist that gathers the people, places, things, and events that he feels have been overlooked—from the invention of the Robertson screw to a 1970s military crackdown against leftists in Argentina. The room that follows is designed like a Black barbershop, a critical place of activism, exchange, and Black innovation and entrepreneurship. Hair itself transmits; it is an important carrier of identity and cultural practice.

Within the various systems of knowledge that he explores, Strachan includes monuments, intrigued by the forces “that compel us to cast memory into matter, and to ask stone to hold the weight of time,” as he writes in the catalog. Strachan’s previous work has included sculptural pietàs of mothers bearing the bodies of their activist sons—showing, for example, a lifeless Malcolm X embraced by his mother, Louise Little. For this exhibition, Strachan developed an installation titled Monument Hall that features a series of historical monuments of his own invention. These topsy-turvy bronzes broadly resemble playing cards, with a figure presented right side up mirroring another rendered upside down. In one, a bronze sculpture of an Ife king stands over an inverted depiction of Pablo Picasso, making dominant the artistic traditions from West Africa that were an important source for the Spanish painter. Another sculpture, in resin and steel, places an equestrian statue of the Haitian revolutionary leader Henri Christophe atop a similar statue of Napoleon, who tried to violently deny the Caribbean nation its independence.

Strachan takes the existing visual language of monuments—grand bronzes, often rendered in a Beaux-Arts style—and adds the stories that are often left out. They are pointed and almost comic. The statue of Christophe, which reaches a height of nearly sixteen feet, teeters over the gallery as if it might come crashing down in a gesture of self-induced iconoclasm. Together with “MONUMENTS,” Strachan’s exhibition suggests the ephemeral nature of the ideas that are rendered in marble and bronze. Monuments may be designed to be permanent, but they can be turned inside out and upside down by us and by the course of history. And old deceptions can be made to reveal new truths.