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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/arts/design/kara-walker-moca-monuments.html

Kara Walker Deconstructs a Statue, and a Myth

As part of the group exhibition “Monuments,” the artist took a Stonewall Jackson bronze and transformed it into a radically new, unsettled thing.

On Jan. 6, 2022, while an uneasy nation marked the first anniversary of the violent attack on the United States Capitol, Hamza Walker was rushing to Virginia to extract a statue of a Confederate general and move it across state lines.

Walker, a curator and arts educator based in Los Angeles, was moving fast. Just two weeks earlier, the nonprofit gallery that he directs, the Brick (then known as LAXART), had been awarded ownership of the 100-year-old equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville, Va., by unanimous vote of the City Council.

The transfer capped an arduous process for Charlottesville, which had decided back in March 2017, prompted by a local activist campaign, to take down the statues of Robert E. Lee and Jackson that had presided over two public squares since the 1920s.

What ensued has become contemporary history: The “Unite the Right” rally of August 2017, when extremists gathered in protest at the Lee statue and one drove a car into a crowd, murdering Heather Heyer, a counter-demonstrator; an acceleration of statue removals in other cities; and for Charlottesville, a tangle of lawsuits, with the Virginia Supreme Court finally confirming, in 2021, the city government’s right to remove and dispose of its statues as it pleased, including by selling or transforming them.

Walker, armed with his receipt — the Brick paid $50,000 to offset the city’s costs — was hurrying to collect the statue of Jackson. Virginia’s Republican governor-elect, Glenn Youngkin, was due to take office on Jan. 15, succeeding Ralph Northam, a Democrat. Walker wanted the monument out before any new roadblocks appeared.

“I had to have it out of state,” Walker recalled in an interview.

A specialty mover met him at the city public works facility where the statue was stored. They loaded the bronze equestrian figure onto a lowboy trailer and sections of its heavy granite base onto flatbed trucks. The convoy headed to a warehouse near Newark airport, in New Jersey.

Then Walker made his next call — to Kara Walker, the renowned artist whose work has long plumbed, in an acerbic vein, the legacy of enslavement and the Civil War in the American psyche. (The two Walkers are not related — “that we know of,” Hamza Walker said.)

“Kara, this is a cab ride away from you,” he told her. “Go and see the monument.”

A Show of Charged Relics

On Oct. 23, “Monuments,” a landmark exhibition that combines decommissioned statues of Confederate and other figures with works by 18 contemporary artists, opens at the Brick and at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, or MOCA, in Los Angeles.

Hatched over eight years ago, the jointly organized exhibition has taken shape during a tumultuous time, as some 173 monuments to the Confederacy have come down around the country. Initially planned for 2023, it opens now as the Trump administration has criticized the removal of Confederate monuments, tapped into white grievance and sought to minimize Black history.

In August, the National Park Service announced plans to rebuild and reinstall a statue of a Confederate general, Albert Pike, near the U.S. Capitol, while the Pentagon said it would reinstall a memorial to the Confederacy that was removed in 2023 from Arlington National Cemetery.

So, leave them up or remove them from view forever? The Los Angeles exhibition marshals artistic strategies to explore new choices, on the premise that there is value in looking at monuments after they have come down. In this spirit, it includes loans of toppled statues, provided by their present owners. The city of Baltimore, for instance, has lent several memorials to Confederate figures that it took down in 2017. A statue of Jefferson Davis is arriving from the Valentine museum in Richmond, Va., where it has been on view, dented and splattered from the 2020 protests there. The family of Josephus Daniels, a white supremacist newspaper publisher in North Carolina who encouraged the Wilmington Coup of 1898, has lent a statue of their ancestor that they took down in 2020.

Surrounding these charged relics — all on view at the Geffen space — will be recent works including a short film by Julie Dash, featuring the opera singer Davóne Tynes and filmed inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., where a white nationalist murdered nine members of the congregation in 2015; Stan Douglas’s five-screen reinterpretation of “Birth of a Nation”; and “Stranger Fruit,” a photography series by Jon Henry. Projects by Cauleen Smith, Bethany Collins, Andres Serrano, Hank Willis Thomas, Leonardo Drew and others complete the roster. The premise — admittedly speculative — is that these juxtapositions might activate, for the toppled monuments, a newly productive, contemporary afterlife.

And then there is Kara Walker, whose work will be shown on its own at the Brick. She has pushed this method to an extreme. Offered the Stonewall Jackson statue, with no restrictions on how to use it, she has taken it apart and reassembled it — deconstructing the equestrian form, to render horse and rider in a kind of melted mutant grotesque. It is a radically new sculpture made from the old.

For Hamza Walker, the opportunity to present Kara Walker with an actual monument to the Confederacy as raw material — “a historical object that represents everything that her work is about” — lends the entire exhibition project its psychic center.

“To me, Kara’s piece is the whole thing,” he said. “The show could almost be considered an excuse to get one of those things into Kara’s hands.”

Hooves, Haunches, Bridles and Necks

On a July morning in her Brooklyn studio, Kara Walker, 55, opened a folder on her laptop with photographs, sketches and notes showing how she made the new sculpture. The piece itself was off-site, awaiting shipment to California; few people so far have seen it up close.

She often gives her works long, archaic-sounding titles full of history references and sarcastic asides, but she has gone concise this time, naming the sculpture “Unmanned Drone.” “It seemed fitting somehow,” she said. “As a weapon of war.”

The work, in a word, is wild. The original 1921 statue, by the New York sculptor Charles Keck, portrayed Jackson charging into battle on his horse Little Sorrel. They formed a dynamic tableau in a classic register: The general cuts a sharp figure, shoulders turned, one arm slightly back, trimmed beard, alert eyes; the horse is in gallop, its mouth open, the wind in its mane.

In Walker’s treatment, sections of man and horse have been cut apart and resoldered together in a tangle of hooves, haunches, bridles and necks, the parts more or less recognizable but the whole an entirely new, unsettled being.

She likened the result to a haint — a Southern concept with roots in Gullah Geechee culture that designates a spirit that has slipped its human form and roams about making mischief and exacting vengeance. Here, what is deconstructed is not just a statue but the myth of suppressed Confederate glory that it represents. Her sculpture, she suggested, “exists as a sort of haint of itself — the imagination of the Lost Cause having to recognize itself for what it is.”

She made the work at a foundry in upstate New York. The first step in the process, she said, was “a really kind of gruesome beheading” of the Jackson figure that she said left her unsettled. Though some people present applauded as the head came off, she said, “I actually felt like it was such a violent act that I was really uncomfortable with it.” But she felt there was no alternative: “I knew that what I was going to do was going to involve not having the head in its right place.”

The artist chose not to visit Charlottesville to study the sculpture’s past or recent context. Rather, she decided to treat its theme as a symbol of the pervasive ideology of the Lost Cause across the South — the efforts to justify the Confederacy as honorable, long after the Civil War — and to focus on the object itself as a formal challenge.

“This was basically mine now, my found object,” she said, recalling her reaction when she encountered the statue in the warehouse in Newark. She resolved to treat it as “an object to be played with and contended with and wrestled with as an artist.”

‘This Frankenstein’s Monster of Itself’

When Walker was 13, she moved with her family from California to Georgia, where her father, the artist Larry Walker, had taken a teaching job. They settled in Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta. Her teenage years unfolded in the shadow of the huge relief sculpture of Lee, Jackson and Davis carved into the granite outcrop that gives the town its name.

Initiated in 1914 and backed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy — a driving force in the wave of Confederate memorialization in the early 20th century — and assorted Ku Klux Klan and other local figures, the monument to the three leaders took more than five decades of planning, designs and delays to complete. The centerpiece of a vast park celebrating the Confederacy, it was dedicated in 1970 — in effect, a retort to desegregation.

In high school in the 1980s, Walker had white friends who claimed “redneck” identity, she said. They saw the park as innocuous, “a place to play video games and whatever, to have a picnic.” To her, the carving encapsulated “this weird insidious way that the Lost Cause looms as a mode of defiance and self-delusion, and for some people that passes as fine — like maybe it’s not the happiest life, but it’s traditional.” She added: “I would rather release it from its entrapment.”

Long known for her drawings and tableaux of cut-paper silhouettes that staged plantation-like scenes with a darkly comedic tone, emphasizing the aberrant and macabre, Walker first worked at monumental scale in 2014, when she installed “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” a sphinx figure coated in sugar, in the former Domino Sugar plant in Brooklyn.

Five years later, for the Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, in London, she built a reinterpretation of the bombastic Queen Victoria Memorial that sits in front of Buckingham Palace — her version peopled by characters sculpted in her distinctive style, alluding to British imperial history, the slave trade and plantation economy and their depictions in art history.

When Hamza Walker suggested getting Kara Walker a Confederate statue, she demurred — weary, she said, of the level of spectacle that felt unavoidable with this sort of work. “I’ve done monuments,” she recalled telling him. “Please don’t make me sing.” But faced with the Jackson statue, she relented, intrigued by the artistic potential of transforming it. “There’s something very satisfying working with the material, the object itself.”

As she developed her concept, the artist absorbed “Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man’s Friend,” by Richard G. Williams Jr. — a 2006 apologia that presents the Confederate general as a Christian evangelizer who disliked slavery but defended it as part divine law, part subordinate to the cause of “states’ rights.” To Walker, the book exemplified the layers of delusion in Lost Cause ideology. (She found it “charming,” she said bitingly.)

Most revealing, she said, was the story of Little Sorrel, which became an object of fetishistic attention after the Civil War. Stabled at the Confederate Soldiers’ Home in Richmond, the horse was brought out for fairs and veterans’ events where people would pull tufts of its mane as keepsakes, even as it grew old and arthritic, eventually requiring a hoist to rise to its feet. After it died — from an inevitable fall, breaking its back — it was taxidermied.

In the equine energy of “Unmanned Drone,” Walker has channeled, ultimately, her sympathy for the animal’s plight, almost subsuming Jackson in the process. (Her research, she added, had her delving into equine anatomy and primers on how horses are butchered.)

“Where I’m at with my work all the time is finding the place where it’s like — OK, but do you want to look at it?” she said. “Can we stay engaged with it?” Of the sculpture, she added, “What it starts to do in space when it’s looming over you, it really is this ghostly apparition, this Frankenstein’s monster of itself.”

Walker has complemented the new sculpture with three works made from sections of the original statue’s granite pedestal. She drew dark silhouettes and stars into the granite using a special ink, and sandblasted around them to produce an effect of relief. The three granite pieces are separate from “Unmanned Drone”; two will be installed in the Brick’s courtyard, one in the main exhibition space. But they offset its aggressive energy with their more lyrical tone, as if she had revealed spirits lurking in the stone.

At root, Walker’s project is an artist’s experiment. Rather than preserve the Confederate memorial or expunge it from the record — the default binary in a polarized politics — she proposes its artistic transformation as a third option. It’s the uncertainty, the sense that neither she nor anyone else can anticipate whether the piece will “work,” that makes the approach liberating.

“How can we be less draconian about culture in America?” she asked. “I’m just wishing that we could be more open and speculative, and derive learning and knowledge from all the exercises that are in play.”

‘I Ain’t Afraid,’ a Curator Says

A certain caution has governed the rollout of “Monuments.” Its curators — Hamza Walker; Bennett Simpson, a senior curator at MOCA; and Kara Walker herself, who was not involved in the selection of works but is credited for her early blessing of the exhibition idea, lending it crucial momentum and credibility — expect backlash, but of unknown type or degree.

Security dispositions have been taken, Hamza Walker said, to protect the museum staff members and works. The public relations rollout has not, to date, shared details of individual works. The nature of Kara Walker’s project has not been reported until now. Also downplayed is the presence at MOCA of the bronze ingots from the melted-down Lee statue in Charlottesville — lent by the city’s Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, pending their transformation into a new work for Charlottesville by an artist to be selected later this year. The Times reported in July that some MOCA board members have said they are worried that the exhibition could cause a problem for the museum.

Still, the show is on. “We may get real pushback,” Simpson said. “But what is a museum if it can’t handle that? What is a museum if it can’t stand up for artists and can’t stand up for political and cultural reflection? It feels core to what the museum should be able to do.”

The project, Simpson added, is based on the hypothesis that juxtaposing Confederate and related monuments with the right contemporary projects can produce a kind of productive “estrangement.” “The premise is that estrangement gets people to see these things that they think they know in a new light. Trying to get past just the censure of the objects, the removal of the objects, and into a place where you can open up other conversations and produce other kinds of aesthetic and political and narrative interactions.”

He added: “But again, it’s a totally novel process for all of us.”

Hamza Walker is ready. The current political moment is driven by fear, he said, and “I ain’t afraid.” Moreover, he noted, only a fraction of Confederate memorials have come down. (Around 700 Confederate memorials, plus many other symbols of the Confederacy, remain up, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

In the studio, Kara Walker voiced optimism. The method of her sculpture, she suggested, might just tease out a kind of civic method for thinking about America — vulnerably and imaginatively. Of course, she couched the thought using a slightly macabre metaphor.

“I feel like I just want to invite somebody into the space and take their skin off — laughingly, lovingly, we will remove each other’s skin,” she said. “That’s the provocation for me. It’s to say, can we be people here for a minute? We can put this stuff back together again and it’s not going to go on as neatly and fit as well as before, because maybe we have to trade some bits.”

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