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.
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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.)
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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. {snip}
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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 Tines 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.
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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.
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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.”
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“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.”
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