LA turns Confederate statues into art exhibit

A huge monument to General Robert E. Lee, who once sparked riots in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, is now a pile of molten bronze, artfully displayed in a Los Angeles museum.

Next to the sculpture are barrels of toxic “slag” from the smelting process.

On the corner is a huge graffitied equestrian statue of Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson – the two most famous Confederate generals of the American Civil War, which the Confederacy lost in 1865 and which ultimately led to the end of slavery in the United States.

“They fought for slavery,” says curator Hamza Walker, who has worked for eight years to acquire and borrow the enormous monuments amid the lawsuits and logistical challenges of transporting tens of thousands of pounds of bronze and granite to Los Angeles.

“The idea of ​​ridiculing these characters. What did they believe? They believed in white supremacy. Period.”

At a time when President Donald Trump is ordering the reinstallation of statues and paintings of Confederate generals, the war stories of American history are at the heart of “Monuments,” which opens October 23 at the Brick and Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The 18 decommissioned Confederate monuments sit alongside works of contemporary art. The massive, graffitied statue of Lee and Jackson, for example, stands next to a giant replica of the “General Lee” car from the iconic TV series The Dukes of Hazzard.

President Trump has often spoken of General Lee’s courage and he and others have criticized the removal and toppling of Confederate monuments, saying it is revisionist history.

White nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, sparking deadly clashes, to prevent the statue’s removal. Subsequently, similar statues sparked clashes in cities across the United States.

“As part of this historical review, our nation’s unprecedented legacy of promoting freedom, individual rights, and human happiness is being reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or irreparably flawed,” President Trump wrote in a March executive order calling for the reinstallation of paintings and monuments.

But Mr. Walker says putting Lee and Jackson on pedestals — even though they lost the war — is racist and promotes Lost Cause ideology which holds that the Civil War was a noble cause for states’ rights, not slavery.

“The right of the state to do what? The reason for the Civil War was slavery,” he said, adding that it perpetuates the idea that the South was a “noble victim” and that slavery wasn’t so bad.

“If you could take them away from slavery, then you could portray them as heroes, even though they lost the war and were on the wrong side of history, fighting for something morally repugnant,” he says.

The centerpiece of the show is “Unmanned Drone” – a completely reconstructed sculpture of Stonewall Jackson by artist Kara Walker, who transformed the horse and rider riding into battle into a headless zombie-like creature.

“The southern vernacular would be a ‘haint,’ which would be a ghostly form,” Kara Walker, who is not related to Hamza Walker, told the BBC when asked how she described the work. “It’s an attempt to rethink the legacy of Stonewall Jackson as a mythology, as a mythological holder of white supremacy.”

Most of the monuments on display will be returned to the towns and villages from which they were borrowed when the exhibition closes in May. But Kara Walker’s sculpture will have to find a new home. And the bronze ingots from Lee’s melted sculpture will once again be transformed into a new work of art.

The statue was removed in 2021 and melted down in 2023 after the Charlottesville City Council voted to donate the statue to the Jefferson School – African American Heritage Center.

“It’s a toxic representation of history, this lost cause narrative, and we’re purifying it,” says Jalane Schmidt, an activist and professor who was there when the statue fell in Charlottesville and when it was melted down in a secret foundry. She came to see him in his new form in Los Angeles.

Living in Charlottesville, she said, the statue was always in the background until a teenager started a petition in 2016 to rename Lee Park and remove the statue because she found it offensive that the city celebrated someone who fought for slavery.

The statue was the focal point of the Unite the Right rally in 2017, which turned deadly when a 21-year-old white nationalist drove his car into counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal and civil rights activist.

Schmidt says the petition and rally have changed public opinion about monuments in Charlottesville and elsewhere.

“Especially after Unite the Right, after we were attacked, well, that was definitely proof that, you know, people are willing to die for symbols, but they’re also willing to kill for them,” she said. “We had to remove them just for our own health.”