For the past decade, Confederate memorials have been a flashpoint in America’s heated culture wars. More than 150 statues and monuments were doused with paint, defaced and brought down by protesters, but in President Trump’s second term, they are being reinstalled. A statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike is returning to Judiciary Square in Washington, D.C., and another, known as the “Reconciliation Monument,” will be restored to Arlington Cemetery.
The tumultuous state of affairs is supercharging a provocative, highly anticipated new exhibition titled “Monuments,” featuring nearly a dozen removed statues, some towering up to 15 feet. The show, co-organized and co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick, opens Thursday and runs through May 3, 2026.
“Monuments” was originally supposed to debut two years ago, and if it had, it would have entered a radically different political landscape.
“Suddenly everyone thinks that we’re doing this in response to our president, which isn’t at all the case. This is more a case of the political moment coming around to capture us,” said MOCA senior curator Bennett Simpson, who organized the show alongside Brick director Hamza Walker, artist Kara Walker (no relation to Hamza), Brick curatorial associate Hannah Burstein and MOCA assistant curator Paula Kroll.
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At MOCA, a statue titled “Confederate Women of Maryland,” erected in Baltimore by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, features two women — one of whom is cradling a fallen male soldier in her lap in a tableau resembling Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” This monument resides directly across from a series of photographs by Jon Henry featuring Black mothers similarly holding their sons in urban environments.
Some, such as a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, were splattered in paint by protesters. Others, including the base of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, were covered in graffiti with phrases like “Protect Black Women.” They appear in the museum just as they looked when they were removed from parks and plazas in Richmond and Charlottesville, Va., respectively. Davis now rests on his side in a room with a group of chilling photographs taken by Andres Serrano of hooded Ku Klux Klan leaders in Georgia.
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A single artwork is housed across town at the Brick — it is set in relief because it stands in a category all its own, said Hamza Walker. The sculpture, Kara Walker’s “Unmanned Drone,” is the only monument that has been physically altered.
Walker used a plasma cutter to slice apart a statue of prominent Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, which she welded back together in an entirely new form. Jackson no longer has a face, but his hair is speared by a portion of his horse’s upper thigh. The horse now appears to be standing upright with its head protruding from the back of its saddle. Jackson’s arm, which was amputated before his death, is now separated from his body and affixed to the edge of the statue’s base. His legs are sliced open, and his saber rests on the ground beside the dissected, reconfigured whole.
The effect is breathtaking and violent.
“Ideologically it’s an affront, aesthetically it’s an affront … on a piano, it’s not just a chord, this is a tone cluster,” said Hamza Walker, of the reimagined statue. “Kara went for it. She did what artists do in terms of marshaling an energy and force, and then concentrating it on this object and coming up with this piece.”
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Kara Walker‘s sculpture seeks to take the focus off Jackson and put it on his horse, a trusty steed named Little Sorrel that Jackson valued for his bravery in battle. Jackson died from his wounds eight days after being hit by friendly fire while returning to camp during the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. He attained saint-like status in the South, which surrendered the Civil War two years later. Little Sorrel was also revered. The red war horse lived to a ripe old age and was trotted out for special events. True believers took patches of Little Sorrel’s fur, and upon its death, the horse was taxidermied.
“With the nature of this object, what do you do with it?” Hamza Walker said of the Jackson statue. “Yeah, here’s your monument back.”
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