A Rare Opportunity You Won’t Forget | MONUMENTS Art Exhibition in Los Angeles

The art exhibition of the year, and possibly the decade. MONUMENTS, featuring the incredible sculpture Unmanned Drone by Kara Walker is a rare opportunity you won’t forget.

This exhibition brings together a collection of primarily Black contemporary artists, alongside other provocative works by people of color, interrogating national myths around glorifying the Confederacy. These artists deconstruct America’s fantasy around post-Civil War America in moving ways, responding to and recasting decommissioned monuments from cities like Baltimore, Raleigh, Charlottesville, and Richmond.

Artists featured in this video: Kara Walker, Karon Davis, Andres Serrano

On view through May 3, 2026

Hello, this is Art with Bob Pincus, and we’re going to be talking about an exhibition at two locations in Los Angeles. One is The Brick, which is a nonprofit space in East Hollywood, and at the Geffen Contemporary, one location of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). This is MONUMENTS.

One of the really interesting things about the show, and it’s an ambitious idea, is to take some of these Confederate monuments that have been removed from locations and bring them into the museum, which has a rather spacious quarters to show these things. But they’re off their plinths or pedestals, and they’re just part of this exhibition.

Putting them in the galleries with contemporary artists who are clearly trying to respond to them in some way, I think really creates an interesting overlay of contemporary on history. It’s like a history lesson without any pedantics or any didactics to it. It’s like living history.

Monuments are really meant to sort of glorify or celebrate those who you think deserve that kind of celebration. One of the disturbing things in American history is the honoring and celebrating of these Confederate war heroes, which was done a lot in the South in the early 20th century, going into the mid-20th century even.

These monuments were meant to celebrate what they called the “Lost Cause.” And of course the Lost Cause was a great euphemism for trying to preserve the culture of slavery,

Standing right behind me is a major sculpture by Kara Walker. This piece is called Unmanned Drone and it is actually a reassembly and transformation of an original Confederate monument by a sculptor named Charles Keck, who was quite respected back then at the time in the early 20th century. And Mr. Keck’s sculpture has been removed from its site, decommissioned as it were from its site.

Kara Walker had said that she had thought of this Gullah concept of “the haint,” which is like a human released from his body and turned into a spirit that kind of roams the land and causes bad things to happen.

She recognizes symbolic power of memorials and public sculptures and monuments. And so she’s taking that power and then turning it against itself. It’s like taking revenge on the original monument. You have his, you know, dismembered body up there at the top. And you have his legs kind of dangling off. They’re lopped off here.

The figure looks like something kind of like moving along and horse legs, but they look like they’re part of a person. So it’s kind of like mixed up. And I think she’s trying to comment on this idea. He’s like this kind of grotesque version of what originally was, the nobility is moved out or stripped away because they weren’t noble.

What were these guys doing? They were trying to keep slavery and keep it intact, right, through a military campaign, a war. So I think it takes that symbolic power and turns it against itself. And this is like evil symbolism, but the original symbolism was latently evil. It’s just they were covering it up with fake nobility.

Look at the horse here. And then she has comments like, “Huge bitemark, chomp. Innards spilled out.” “USA colored red, white, red and white striped guts.” You know, and you don’t see all this in the sculpture, but I think these are some of the thoughts that she must have had thinking about the period and what she was doing with the sculpture.

And it says up here, “I am the hope and the dream of the slave.” So I feel like in a way creating this piece, which takes, as I said before, aesthetic revenge on the South and Jackson and all these people creating these memorials is a way of honoring the slaves.

Kind of remarkable, the idea of taking a piece apart like that and redoing it, both imaginatively but also just purely technically. To do both of those things is pretty amazing.

And outside here, there are more elements of the base, which then she has done images on. So again, it’s like taking their symbolism, casting it aside and superimposing her own symbolism on it, right?

It’s supposed to be part of like the noble base of the thing, right? And then so you flip it over, but what was the underbelly of their so-called false nobility? It was the slave economy, right? That was the thing that kept their society alive, made it work. That was the structure of it. So it’s kind of like exposing it and giving nobility to those who were enslaved.

A continuation of that grotesqueness that she finds in Jackson and almost making it look like he’s like a, there’s like a sort of some kind of serpentine figure here, right? And there’s boots. So it’s kind of like a grotesque monster that emerges from ruminations about the South.

One of the really striking contemporary pieces in the show was by a woman named Karon Davis called Descendant.

And it’s very dramatic white plaster sculpture, quite tall. And it’s sort of elevated, it’s kind of an interesting piece within a piece because she did a sculpture of her son, but he’s holding a little sculpture in his hand. And it’s of one of those Confederate monuments from that period that depicts a general, John Hunt Morgan, also a slaveholder of course. And so in a way it elevates her son making him the large scale image and diminishes that image of the monument into a little tiny miniature. So in a way it kind of defangs the whole idea of the monuments.

A good example of these monuments is by Edward V. Valentine. It was a sculpture of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy.

This sculpture was basically taken down, toppled, paint bombed, and now it lies on its side in the gallery right near some interesting photographs that were done back in the early ’90s by Andres Serrano, a well-known photographer who gained access to the Klan, and there’s very dramatic pictures of the Klan right near the Jefferson Davis picture, excuse me, sculpture. So that would be a connection that we could make in history.

There’s a very large sculpture in the galleries by J. Maxwell Miller, but it was commissioned by a group called the Daughters of the Confederacy, who were a big support group for all these, putting up these sculptures everywhere, these monuments.

And it pictures, you know, a woman holding her, the dying soldier. So it has all these associations with the Pieta, and then there’s another noble figure standing behind them you know. So you have this idea of the lost cause. Of course, it’s not connected to any real historical events. It’s just trying to make them look noble.

It’s interesting to think about how this piece is in dialogue with some photographs that are in the show by a contemporary artist, Jon Henry, photographic pieces where he asked some mothers to pose with their sons in the Pieta pose.

And those were in response to all the killings that had been, you know, in the news, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, others in that period of time. So he was responding to events. But it’s interesting how that Pieta image connects these, that old sculpture to these contemporary pieces.

Thinking again about the disturbing and really interesting Unmanned Drone piece that Kara Walker made. If you look back, she started doing public work a little over a decade ago and she did a very large scale piece in an abandoned sugar factory that was about to be torn down in Brooklyn and so she started thinking about the sugar trade. So you have this massive figure in the space looking like kind of a powerful cross between a black mammy and a sphinx and it’s meant to sort of empower this kind of figure that would have normally been seen probably in a little bit of a racist context, right? But changing the whole context of it in this place and it’s made out of sugar. So these big sugar blocks and then there’s these little figures around, standing figures that are children made out of sugar, like kind of sticky molasses like sugar, which was meant to allude to the way child labor had been used in the slave trade to get the sugar harvested and then brought to market.

Fast forward now to 2018, and she was asked to do a piece for a show called Prospect down in New Orleans. So she created this really kind of rather large scale wagon or caravan as she called it, The Katastwóf Karavan, which was like Catastrophe Wagon, which had these silhouettes on it, which was her kind of iconic imagery that she’s used in her art before. And it showed slaves being basically hauled off from the market there to be sold off and taken off to plantations.

And the piece was located when it was first shown right down there on the waterfront where slaves would have been brought to market and sold.

When she first showed it, there’s a big calliope with it. And the musician played these kind of sounds that you would have heard on the steamboats, calliope music, and it sounds really kind of creepy, not happy and carnival like, but sort of like dark carnival. So I think it was a very effective piece about the history of slavery connected to that site.

I would really encourage you to go to both exhibition spaces because both spaces do really make up the exhibition: The Brick and the Geffen Contemporary.

But it all fits together as one large, really interesting and engaging exhibition.

Thank you for watching. This is Art with Bob Pincus.

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