LA turns Confederate statues into art exhibit

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

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

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

“They fought for slavery,” says curator Hamza Walker, who spent eight years acquiring and borrowing the massive monuments amid lawsuits and logistical challenges associated with moving tens of thousands of pounds of bronze and granite to Los Angeles.

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

As President Donald Trump orders the reinstallation of statues and paintings of Confederate generals, warring narratives of American history are at the heart of “Monuments,” which opens Oct. 23 at The Brick and at Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Modern Art.

18 decommissioned Confederate monuments are displayed alongside contemporary art. For example, a massive, graffiti-covered statue of Lee and Jackson sits next to a giant replica of the General Lee car sculpture from the iconic TV show The Dukes of Hazzard.

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

White nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, sparking deadly clashes, to prevent the statue from being torn down. Subsequently, such statues provoked clashes in cities across the United States.

“This historic review reconstructs our nation's unparalleled legacy of promoting freedom, individual rights, and human happiness as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” President Trump wrote in a March executive order calling for the reinstallation of the paintings and monuments.

But Mr. Walker says putting Lee and Jackson on pedestals – even though they lost the war – is racist and promotes the “Lost Cause” ideology, which argues that the Civil War was a noble cause in defense of states' rights, not slavery.

“States' rights to do what? The cause of the Civil War was slavery,” he said, adding that it perpetuates the idea that the South was a “noble victim” and that slavery was not so terrible.

“If you could distance them from slavery, right, then you could portray them as heroes, even though they lost the war and ended up on the wrong side of history, fighting for something that was morally repugnant,” he says.

The show's centerpiece is “Drone,” a completely reconstructed Stonewall Jackson sculpture by artist Kara Walker that transformed a horse and its rider heading into battle into a headless, zombie-like creature.

“The Southern word would be 'ghost', which is a ghostly form,” Kara Walker, no relation to Hamza Walker, told the BBC when asked how she described the work. “It’s an attempt to reframe Stonewall Jackson’s legacy as mythology, as a mythological vehicle of white supremacy.”

Most of the monuments on display will be returned to the cities from which they were borrowed after 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 down 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, it's a hopeless narrative, and we're clearing it out,” says Jalaine Schmidt, an activist and professor who was there when the statue came down in Charlottesville and when it was melted down at the secret foundry. She came to see him in a new form in Los Angeles.

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

The statue was the center of the 2017 Unite the Right rally that turned deadly when a 21-year-old white nationalist drove his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old lawyer and civil rights activist.

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

“Especially after United the Right, after we were attacked, well, obviously it was evidence 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 health.”