2This question gained renewed urgency in August 2025, when the Trump administration reinstalled in Washington, D.C., the statue of Albert Pike—a Confederate diplomat—after it had been toppled in 2020, and announced plans to restore the original names of military bases honoring Confederate generals. The cultural war surrounding memorialization in public space remains intense, and it was therefore legitimate to worry that Monuments might never open. The exhibition takes a clear risk by staging Confederate statues in dialogue with contemporary artworks that critically engage with the production, circulation, and contestation of historical narratives. As the press release states, “Monuments explores how these contested objects are perceived today and poses fundamental questions about the historical and contemporary functions of memorials, as well as the nature of memorialization and commemoration itself” (The Brick and Museum of Contemporary Art 1).

3This text should not be read as a standard exhibition review. It is based on research carried out between 2024 and 2026, encompassing both the preparation of Monuments by its curators and the exhibition itself once it opened. This piece thus combines critical observation with a longer-term research perspective, situating Monuments within broader debates on memorialization, public memory, and the politics of historical narrative in the United States.

Genesis of the project

• 718 monuments and statues, nearly 300 of which are in Georgia, Virginia or North Carolina

• 109 public schools named for Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis or other Confederate icons

• 80 counties and cities named for Confederates

• 9 official Confederate holidays in six states and

• 10 U.S. military bases named for Confederates (Gunter et al. 7)

5The second event which triggered Hamza Walker’s desire to create the exhibition was the violence which erupted in Charlottesville, VA, in August 2017, after the "Unite the Right" rally which ended up in the death and injury of many counter-protesters.

6In 2019, Hamza Walker and Hannah Burstein started using the database provided by the SPLC, a database which tracks every Confederate monument, memorial, symbol across the country and registers the monuments which have come down. They were interested in those which had been removed, wondering what happened to them: Had they been totally or partially removed? Had they been destroyed, stored somewhere or reinstalled in other places? They figured out that from 2017 to 2020, 40 removals took place, and after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, there was an acceleration as about 150 monuments were removed. They consider that there are two waves of monuments coming down (Schwartzman et al.), and 2020 was a pivotal year as “the struggle of BLM against police violence merged with the fight to remove Confederate monuments” (Walker 2023). The removals were voted and organized by city councils in order to ensure public safety for their communities, before demonstrators took down the statues themselves. After the removal, some municipalities, like Charlottesville, VA, received various statements of interest, from individuals, or groups, and organizations seeking ownership of the Confederate statues to put them on display in new locations (O’Hare). Walker and Burstein started contacting municipalities, local authorities, historical and art institutions which are now the “stewards of these objects” (Tholas, Walker and Burstein 2024), asking them to borrow the decommissioned Civil War monuments to exhibit them in an indoor gallery space alongside new artworks by contemporary artists (Walker 2021). The municipalities or institutions agreeing to make loans would not receive compensation but they would be acknowledged in the catalog for the show, and LAXART (the former name of The Brick) would pay for the costs of transporting the monuments and insuring them.

7Interestingly, their project received good informal support from politicians, for instance county commissioners, who were genuinely sympathetic, but only “behind closed doors”. After giving an off-the-record agreement to lend a monument for the show, they ended up never giving an official answer to the curators’ inquiry. Their personal views on the project differed from what they were actually allowed to do. In some cases, city councils had no desire to lend the statues and sometimes, when they did, they were unfortunately tied in lawsuits about the legality of the removal (Tholas, Walker and Burstein 2024). The city of Baltimore can be taken as an example as it valued the project as a “worthy endeavor” but declined the request to borrow for city-owned monuments (Gunt). For instance, in Charleston, SC, the descendants of John C. Calhoun filed a first lawsuit against Charleston City Council and South Carolina Attorney to oppose the removal of Calhoun’s statue from Marion Square in June 2020. Then, a second lawsuit was actually filed with the support of a monument protection group to directly target Walker and Burstein’s loan inquiry, asking “to prevent the city from transferring the statue to “any party outside of the jurisdiction of the State of South Carolina” and instead return the monument to its original place or another agreed-upon place within the city of Charleston” (Ardary).

8Among the 200 statues that came down, the curators of the exhibition had selected 68 statues and secured the loan of 16 monuments for the exhibition. Their selection was articulated around the narratives provided by the statues, the year the statues were fabricated and erected, the groups who sponsored the creation of the statues, etc. Considering that many statues offered a rather similar vision or image, they distinguished a smaller number that appeared outstanding and officially requested the loan of these statues, with more or less success as we have explained (Tholas, Walker and Burstein 2024). The goal seemed to present monuments epitomizing the diversity of the Lost Cause propaganda and the tales and mythology that were constructed during the Reconstruction and afterwards not only in the South but also in Northern states (Schwartzman et al.). Here are a few examples of the monuments which were supposed to be presented in the show in 2024:

• 4 monuments from Baltimore, MD, among which a 1948 statue of Lee and Jackson and a 1903 monument to the Confederate soldiers and sailors

• The 1879 Emancipation group from Boston, created by Thomas Ball; similar to the one which is still standing in Washington D.C. and criticized for representing the white savior complex

• A Houston, TX, monument from 1907 entitled “Spirit of the Confederacy”

• Different monuments and elements belonging to Richmond, VA: The 1907 Jefferson Davis Monument, the 1929 Matthew Fontaine Maury Monument, the hundred stones from the different pedestals

• The 1921 Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson statue from Charlottesville, VA

9Apart from the decommissioned Confederate monuments, the show welcomed artworks commissioned for the show itself, and preexisting artworks. Among the contemporary artists initially willing to collaborate, we can name Nona Faustine (Fig. 1), known for her White Shoes series about the commodification of the black woman’s body, Hank Willis Thomas, who is committed to the production of public art, Jon Henry, who is famous for his photographic series of mothers and sons posing in pietà. Some artworks were also commissioned for the exhibition. For instance, Walter Price was committed to create a series of 13 paintings in response to the Matthew Fontaine Maury Monument (Fig. 2) and raise the issue of slavery and Middle Passage; Kevin Jerome Emerson would make a film portrait of Richard Bradley, who climbed a pole in front of the San Francisco Civic Center in 1984 to remove the Confederate flag, as a way to remember the history of black protesters against Southern symbols. Hamza Walker explained at the time that the artists that had been chosen were in varying degrees engaged with some aspect of American history or questions of African American identity in relation to the legacy of slavery. None of the artists who were approached had any reservation about the show and they were all very receptive to the project. The curators sometimes suggested a topic to an artist because of his/her previous work and, other times, they commissioned a very specific creation (Walker 2023).

Curatorial framework

10When preparing the show, Walker and Burstein wished to create a spectacular exhibition, with a never-before-seen subject matter in a gigantic museum space, which would make people react either positively or negatively because the exhibition, as they said, was “not business as usual” and they wanted to avoid a lukewarm or indifferent reception of their work (Tholas, Walker and Burstein 2024). They were concerned with triggering a lasting impact on their spectators and wondered how they were going to combine the ingredients of spectacular attraction experiences, namely dramatic effects, plot, grand scale, and authenticity (Counts 279-281), without betraying the need for restraint and solemnity inherent to the topics to be evoked. Monuments had to be a cleverly awe-inspiring experience in order to raise questions related to national history and identity.

11The curators considered that displaying decommissioned monuments alongside contemporary art was a way to recontextualize them and make them part of now (Schwartzman et al.). The decontextualization or repurposing process would separate the monuments from their previous message within the Lost Cause campaign aiming at shifting the rhetoric about the meaning of the Civil War and the connection with contemporary artworks was supposed to “make the monuments accountable for the present” (Walker 2023). Moreover, according to Hamza Walker, many of the monuments to be displayed had been damaged and there were eventually “more of an artefact of 2019 or 2020 than they [were] speaking to the past” (Walker 2023). We can think of the Jefferson Davis statue covered in pink paint presented at The Valentine Museum in Richmond, VA, but what also comes immediately to mind is the Robert Lee Monument in Richmond as well. The statue was transformed and reappropriated by the local population before its removal; with all the graffiti standing as a palimpsest of citizen writings and with the gigantic portrait of George Floyd projected on the pedestal. For French scholar Bertrand Tillier, this alteration of the monument transformed it into a “counter-monument” voicing popular contestation against anti-black racism and violence (Tillier 128). Tillier coined the term “Statuoclastie”, in other words iconoclasm directly targeting public statuary / public statues, and explained that the contestation and desecration of the Confederate monuments partake in a journey to challenge a deceptive “social and political fiction” (Tillier 52).

Exhibition structure

15Alongside the sculpture, visitors have access to preparatory drawings, sketches, collages, study notes, and computer-based transformation models developed by the artist. Together, these materials add another narrative layer to Walker’s transformative intervention, making visible her creative process, sources, and conceptual hesitations. The written comments accompanying the studies are particularly incisive. On a drawing, Walker describes the project as “an act of redress and healing but who heals a wound that continually opens itself,” a remark that directly addresses the United States’ persistent inability to confront racial violence and reckon with the most distorted and painful aspects of its history. The drawings reveal alternative propositions considered by the artist, including replacing Jackson with Harriet Tubman riding astride and facing backwards, or staging a confrontation between Jackson and a naked Black enslaved woman on horseback. The final version ultimately centers on the figure of the monster itself, a form that concentrates the violence of the Lost Cause rather than diffusing it across narrative substitution. This monstrous figure reappears in another crucial element of the work: the transformed pedestal (Fig. 4 and 5). The pedestal has been divided into three distinct pieces, one of which bears a carved image of a multi-limbed hydra-like creature, while the others feature carved stars and the silhouette of a solitary Black woman. Walker’s decision to rework the pedestal is fundamental. Traditionally, the pedestal functions as an instrument of elevation, authority, and permanence, contributing to the production of heroic narratives through physical and symbolic height. By fragmenting and carving into it, Walker exposes and undermines this logic of glorification. The dismantling of the pedestal thus becomes another strategy for dismantling the myths of imagined Southern grandeur, revealing monumentality itself as a constructed and deeply ideological form.

18The exhibition’s spatial organization echoes this conceptual framework. Visitor circulation between the different groupings is facilitated by the deliberate avoidance of density: the galleries are not crowded, and the exhibition resists visual saturation. Instead, a sense of restraint prevails, enabling sustained attention to individual works without producing a feeling of overload or exhaustion. The exhibition design is airy and minimalist, allowing ample space for the works and reinforcing the exhibition’s broader aim: to suspend monumentality, slow down perception, and prompt viewers to consider monuments not as fixed symbols of consensus, but as part of a larger, contested network of cultural and political meaning. As visitors enter the exhibition, Martin Puryear’s Tabernacle (2019) appears alongside the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1903) by Frederick Ruckstull, originally erected in Baltimore (Fig. 8). Puryear’s sculpture, whose form is based on a cap worn by soldiers during the Civil War, is covered in worn black canvas, with an early nineteenth-century floral fabric draped beneath it. Its material layering and muted palette evoke protection, concealment, and mourning rather than triumph. This restrained, abstract presence stands in sharp contrast to Ruckstull’s figurative monument, which depicts an angel supporting a dying Confederate soldier with her right hand while raising a wreath in her left. Once conceived as a glorifying allegory of sacrifice and redemption, the sculpture now bears visible traces of contestation as it is partially damaged and marked with red paint following protests in 2015. Placed side by side, the two works immediately establish the exhibition’s central tension between abstraction and figuration, reverence and rupture, and signal the critical reframing of Confederate monumentality that structures the show as a whole.

19Hank Willis Thomas’s Suspension of Hostilities (2019), which stages an orange 1969 Dodge Charger known as the General Lee—named after the Confederate general in the television series The Dukes of Hazzard—is placed in dialogue with Laura Gardin Fraser’s monumental double equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (1948) (Fig 9). This rare sculptural format reveals the continued mobilization of Lost Cause narratives well into the Cold War era, underscoring how monumentality served as a vehicle for cultural propaganda, promoting a distorted and historically inaccurate mythology of the Confederacy. Nearby, Karon Davis’s Descendant (2025), which satirizes traditional representations of General John Hunt Morgan by reducing the figure to a toy-like form held in the hand of a monumental figure modeled on the artist’s son, is juxtaposed with J. Maxwell Miller’s Confederate Women of Maryland (1917), exposing the gendered and sentimental dimensions of Confederate commemoration (Fig. 10). Elsewhere, Andres Serrano’s provocative photographic series depicting Ku Klux Klan officials (1990) is installed alongside Edward V. Valentine’s damaged statue of Jefferson Davis (Fig. 11), whose critical display at the Valentine Museum has become a reference point in ongoing debates surrounding Confederate monuments and memorabilia.

20One of the most compelling and unsettling elements of the exhibition is the presentation of bronze ingots and a fragment of the granite base from the emblematic Robert E. Lee Monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, after the statue was melted down at the request of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which gained ownership of the monument in 2021. These remnants are accompanied by a metal container filled with residual impurities produced during the melting process (Tholas, Walker and Burstein 2026). Stripped of figuration and symbolism, the former monument survives only as matter: metal, stone, and waste. Like Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone, this display confronts the question of what it means to dismantle monuments and whether such acts can give rise to new forms of memorialization. Rather than proposing closure or reconciliation, the presentation foregrounds material transformation as a critical gesture, which exposes both the violence embedded in monumental forms and the difficulty of reworking them into objects capable of fostering collective reckoning. In doing so, it underscores the unresolved tension between the desire for communal repair and the persistent fractures shaping the American past and present. Interestingly, when discussing this section of the exhibition with artists known for their public art practices, they expressed a sense of unease at the idea of reusing these materials because of their charged and infamous past, describing them as if they were “cursed.” This reaction is telling. It points to the extent to which monuments are not only symbolic forms but also repositories of historical violence, capable of transmitting affect, discomfort, and ethical hesitation even after their physical dismantling. The reluctance to repurpose the melted bronze underscores the limits of material recycling as a redemptive gesture.

21While the transformation of monuments into raw matter may appear to offer a path toward renewal, the persistence of moral and historical contamination complicates any straightforward narrative of reuse or healing. In this sense, the ingots function less as neutral resources than as unresolved historical residues. The idea that materials themselves are laden with meaning is echoed by Leonardo Drew’s Number 363 (2023), a large-scale work composed of cotton (Fig. 12). Formally aligned with minimalist aesthetics, the piece takes the form of a monumental geometric structure whose apparent abstraction belies its historical charge. By mobilizing cotton as both material and subject, Drew foregrounds the capitalist foundations of slavery and the systematic exploitation of enslaved people within the cotton economy. Like the bronze ingots, the cotton is anything but neutral. Despite its pristine, almost immaculate appearance, it carries the weight of violence, extraction, and coerced labor; this whiteness is inseparable from the blood of enslaved people who produced it. The work thus exposes a tension between visual purity and historical impurity. Number 363 extends the exhibition’s broader argument: that matter itself can function as an archive, bearing witness to histories that resist erasure or aesthetic cleansing.

22The last work from the exhibition I would like to discuss is Cauleen Smith’s installation The Warden (2025), which combines a CCTV camera with the statue known as the Vindicatrix, an allegorical female figure that once crowned the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Richmond, Virginia (Fig. 13). The Vindicatrix, a personification of vengeance that visually dramatized the Confederate motto Deo Vindice (“God will avenge”) inscribed on the pedestal standing next to the statue, translates white supremacist ideology into a language of divine justice, moral righteousness, and idealized feminine virtue. In Smith’s installation, the statue is presented with its back turned to the viewer, its raised, vengeful arm illuminated by blue and red spotlights. This staging evokes both distorted forms of patriotism and regimes of surveillance, collapsing historical allegory into present-day structures of control. By introducing the apparatus of CCTV, Smith foregrounds the continuity between monumental authority and modern technologies of observation. The work resonates strongly with ongoing debates around racialized surveillance in the United States, suggesting that systems of monitoring and discipline have merely shifted form rather than disappeared. The use of reflective black walls and screens further destabilizes perception, producing layered reflections and visual disorientation that draw the viewer into the scene. In doing so, The Warden operates within the register of speculative fiction, imagining the possible return or persistence of Confederate values under new guises. Seen against the backdrop of heightened political tension and recurrent episodes of state and racial violence in the United States in the mid-2020s, the installation reads less as dystopian fantasy than as a troubling mirror of the present.

23My visit ended with the fragments of the granite base of the Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond, Virginia, removed by city authorities in 2022, following the removal of the statue itself in 2021. Covered with layers of tags, slogans, and messages left by local residents in support of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd, the base stands as a powerful visual reminder of how monuments were recently repurposed as sites of protest and as material supports for freedom of expression. Stripped of its commemorative function, it became a surface for voices long excluded from public space. I was reminded of a conversation I once had with Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, who suggested that rather than removing such monuments entirely, it might have been more meaningful to preserve them in their transformed state within the public sphere. Marked, contested, and discussed, these altered monuments had become collective spaces for communities who had endured decades of violence and exclusion embodied by their original presence. The fragment of the Lee monument base encapsulates this shift because it testifies to the moment when African American communities in Richmond reclaimed the site, turning a symbol of white supremacy into a new, if fragile, space of memory, resistance, and civic expression.

Challenges and responsibilities

24During a conversation with Hamza Walker and Hannah Burstein after seeing the exhibition, I asked whether, given the content of Monuments and the presidential administration’s stance on historical narrative and the curation of American culture, the project had encountered any form of institutional rebuke or political pressure. According to the curators, the exhibition has not been the object of official criticism or direct interference. Its presentation in mid-sized and independent institutions appears to have offered a form of relative protection. Less exposed than blockbuster exhibitions in major national museums, Monuments has remained largely below the radar of overt political reprisal. That said, Walker emphasized that risk-taking was intrinsic to the very conception of the project. From the outset, the curators anticipated the possibility of backlash, even if none had materialized so far. This awareness shaped their approach, without ultimately defining it. As the opening deadline approached, their primary concerns proved to be far more practical than political: ensuring that newly commissioned contemporary works would be completed on time, and that sufficient space could be secured to accommodate both the decommissioned monuments and the contemporary installations responding to them. These logistical challenges, rather than external censorship, emerged as the most immediate pressures on the project. At the same time, both curators stressed the difficulty of what they described as “orchestrating an experience” so deeply entangled with an intense economy of emotions. Bringing together objects saturated with violence, loss, anger, and grief required careful calibration, not only of space and sequence but of affect (Tholas, Walker and Burstein 2026). In this sense, Monuments is not simply an exhibition about contested history; it is also an experiment in curatorial responsibility, testing how institutions can stage emotionally charged material without collapsing into spectacle or into a curatorial mode that instructs viewers what to think rather than allowing space for interpretation.

25As Bertrand Tillier has argued, controversial statues are colossal, both symbolically and materially, and the question of their fate, storage, and visibility is often deliberately obscured (Tillier 231). While the presence of Confederate monuments in public space is rightly contested, their total disappearance raises equally troubling issues. Removed under the pretext of preservation, many statues have been rendered invisible, their physical absence interrupting public debate about their artistic, historical, and political significance. Yet invisibility does not equate to erasure: these monuments persist in collective memory (Tillier 210), and cancelling their material existence risks a form of historical negationism that forecloses difficult but necessary conversations about the violence embedded in American history. In this context, museums emerge not as neutral repositories or convenient sites of concealment, but as spaces of mediation and responsibility. As Elisabeth Merritt has noted, exhibiting such statues requires institutions to make visible the multiple layers of their histories—from their creation and ideological function to their contestation, removal, and afterlives (Merritt). Museums have to create conditions for critical engagement, education, and debate at a moment. Monuments takes up this challenge by refusing both glorification and disappearance. As its curators have stated, the exhibition seeks to engage constructively with decommissioned statues, fostering acceptance of their existence but also of their removal while ensuring they are not reinstalled in public space (Tholas et al. 2024). In doing so, the exhibition proposes a model for the future of such monuments, one grounded not in reverence or erasure, but in accountability, analysis, and sustained public dialogue.