Various Artists
MONUMENTS
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA; The Brick
October 23, 2025 – May 3, 2026
An exhibition at MOCA and The Brick confronts toppled Confederate monuments by placing them in dialogue with contemporary art.
“What is the role of art and culture in sociopolitical events?” Hamza Walker, director of The Brick, first posed this question in the aftermath of the 2015 shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, Confederate monuments began to fall from civic space and enter political crisis.
Nearly a decade later, that inquiry culminates in MONUMENTS — one of the first museum projects to treat decommissioned Confederate statuary as curatorial material rather than civic burden. The exhibition reframes toppled Confederate monuments alongside contemporary works that confront, complicate, or redirect their symbolic authority. It asks what happens when imagery built to enforce obedience is brought into a space of critical seeing instead.
Jointly presented by MOCA and The Brick, the project began when The Brick submitted a competitive proposal to the Charlottesville City Council to receive the city’s decommissioned Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson monument. Removed in 2021 after years of litigation following the deadly Unite the Right rally, the statue is one of more than 170 Confederate memorials taken down nationwide since 2015.
Photograph of the Confederate Women’s Monument by C. Ryan Patterson for the Special Commission to Review Baltimore’s Public Confederate Monuments, 2015 October 7.
Charlottesville’s RFP did not permit safekeeping. It required transformation. To fulfill that mandate, Walker invited Kara Walker (no relation), whose work has long excavated the afterlives of anti-Black violence. Her reconfiguration of the Jackson monument — Unmanned Drone (2023) — is the conceptual fulcrum of the show, going beyond removal into the active unmaking of power.
From this anchor point, the exhibition expands across both institutions, pairing decommissioned civic monuments with works by nearly twenty contemporary artists. The curators — Hamza Walker, Kara Walker, and MOCA’s Bennett Simpson — construct a procession that moves from blunt confrontation to layered witness.
Jon Henry, Untitled #31, Wynwood, FL, 2017, digital archival print on matte paper, 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
The tone is set immediately at MOCA, where visitors encounter fragments from the 1890 Robert E. Lee Monument base — removed from Richmond’s Monument Avenue in 2021 — still bearing the graffitied instruction “Do Better.” The phrase functions as indictment, thesis, and challenge. In the same gallery stand Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl’s Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1903) and J. Maxwell Miller’s Confederate Women of Maryland (1917), both removed by Baltimore in 2017. Nearby, Karon Davis’s Descendant (2025) confronts them directly: her son Moses stands on a pedestal gripping a miniature replica of the John Hunt Morgan statue — inherited myth versus embodied lineage (Morgan was a Kentucky enslaver and Confederate general).
Stan Douglas, Birth of a Nation (still), 2025, five-channel video installation (color, silent), 13:20 minutes. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. Commissioned by the Hartwig Art Foundation with the Brick, Los Angeles. ©Stan Douglas
Photography deepens the indictment. In her White Shoes series, the late Nona Faustine stages her body as counter-monument at sites of enslavement, including Wall Street. Andrés Serrano’s series The Klan(1990) presents robed members of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan photographed against a dark background, their eyes peering through their hoods. Opposite them stands the toppled, paint-bombed monument toJefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy — collapsing the distance between spectacle and supremacy. Serrano grants the Klan the aesthetics of portraiture; Davis’s statue grants them its infrastructure.
A quieter counterpoint emerges in Hugh Mangum’s studio portraits of Black and white sitters (1897–1922), which Kara Walker has described as the work of “an itinerant artist seeing the people.” Installed opposite statues of Chief Justice Roger Taney — author of the Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could never be citizens — and publisher Josephus Daniels — who incited the 1898 Wilmington coup, in which white supremacists overthrew a multiracial government and killed an estimated 60 to 300 Black residents — Mangum’s contact sheets become a counter-archive of humanity against the bronze fictions that sought to define who counted as a subject.
Nona Faustine, Ye Are My Witness, Brooklyn, NY, 2018, pigment print, 33 3/8 x 50 in. (84.8 x 127 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Nona Faustine and Higher Pictures.
The emotional and conceptual apex comes at The Brick, where Unmanned Drone stands alone: Jackson’s likeness is not simply relocated but dismantled into a contorted centaur — part man, part horse (Little Sorrel). The horse’s head peers from behind as Jackson’s legs, now backward in the stirrups, are severed from any heroic posture. It is not a monument but its afterimage.
What MONUMENTS ultimately exposes is not just the collapse of these statues, but the fragility of the histories they were built to secure. By staging toppled icons beside works that refuse mythmaking, the exhibition shifts attention from what these figures claimed to represent toward the social harm they were created to obscure. The result is not erasure but exposure — not the end of history, but the end of its unquestioned pedestal. And in that shift, the exhibition circles back to Hamza Walker’s original question: not what monuments once meant, but what art now permits us to see.
Cover image: Walter Price, Pond de Rivaaahh, 2023, acrylic and gesso on canvas, 65 x 130 in. (165.1 x 330.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo by Elisabeth Bernstein. All images courtesy The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick.
