LA turns Confederate statues into art exhibit

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

Next to the statue are barrels of toxic “slag” left over from the melting process.

In the corner is a huge, graffitied equestrian statue of Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the two most famous Confederate generals of the U.S. 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 worked for eight years to acquire and loan the massive monuments, amid lawsuits and the logistical challenges of transporting tens of thousands of pounds of bronze and granite to Los Angeles.

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

At a time when President Donald Trump has ordered the relocation of statues and paintings of Confederate generals, conflicting narratives of American history are at the center of “Monuments,” opening Oct. 23 at The Brick and Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

18 decommissioned Confederate monuments are displayed alongside contemporary works of art. For example, a huge, graffiti-studded statue of Lee and Jackson stands next to a giant replica statue of the “General Lee” car from the iconic TV show The Dukes of Hazzard.

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

White nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 to prevent the removal of the statue, leading to deadly clashes. Similar statues subsequently sparked clashes in cities across the United States.

“Under this historic overhaul, our Nation’s unique legacy of advancing freedom, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” President Trump said in an executive order in March calling for the restoration of the paintings and monuments. he wrote.

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

“What does the state have the right to do? The Civil War was caused by slavery,” he said, adding that it perpetuates the idea that the South was a “noble victim” and that slavery wasn’t that bad.

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

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

“The Southern vernacular could be a ‘ghost’, a ghostly form,” Kara Walker, no relation to Hamza Walker, told the BBC when asked how she described the work. “This is an attempt to rethink the legacy of Stonewall Jackson as a mythology, as the mythological owner of white supremacy.”

Many of the monuments on display will be returned to the cities and towns from which they were borrowed when the exhibition ends in May. But Kara Walker’s statue will need to find a new home. The bronze ingots from the melted Lee statue will be re-formed 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.

“This is a toxic representation of history, this lost cause narrative, and we are purifying it,” says activist and professor Jalane Schmidt, who was present when the statue was torn down in Charlottesville and melted down in a secret foundry. He came to Los Angeles to see it in its new form.

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

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

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

“Especially after Unite the Right, after they were attacked, it was clearly evidence that people were willing to die for symbols, but they were also willing to kill for them,” he said. “We had to remove them for our own health.”