Those toppled Confederate monuments? See what artists did with them in a new exhibit in LA

In 2020, following George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis, almost 100 Confederate monuments were removed from public display.

Now, in Monuments, 10 decommissioned statues, most of which are Confederate, have been juxtaposed with new and borrowed works by 19 contemporary artists, inviting viewers to reflect on America’s turbulent history with racism and discrimination.

The contemporary works span painting, film and video, sculpture, and photography.

The exhibit is a collaboration between MOCA and The Brick, a nonprofit gallery in East Hollywood.

"Between the decommissioned monuments and the turn of events that resulted in their being taken down, this exhibition's themes encompass the whole of United States history, from 1619 to yesterday," said Hamza Walker, director of The Brick, in a statement.

"This gave us wide latitude in the selection of both pre-existing and commissioned contemporary artwork. In both cases, the works in this exhibition address the questions of who we want to be as a nation, and who and what is worth remembering, let alone celebrating," Walker added.

The artists have taken a wide range of approaches, wrestling head-on with the racist symbols and ideas embodied by the removed monuments.

Kara Walker's Unmanned Drone, 2023 is in the exhibit Monuments, at The Brick, a gallery in East Hollywood, Los Angeles.

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©Ruben Diaz 2025

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Courtesy MOCA Los Angeles

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Kara Walker took a bronze equestrian monument of "Stonewall" Jackson from Charlottesville, Virginia and remade it, as if putting the pieces in a blender and hitting pulse twice. Walker is based in New York and has a track record of subversive approaches to put the darkest aspects of racism in front of viewers. She’s mostly known for her life-sized silhouette depictions of scenes inspired by slavery in the U.S.

Walker’s work at The Brick is called Unmanned Drone (2023) and takes recognizable elements of the monument and makes them unrecognizable in a way that may unsettle the viewer.

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.

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Stan Douglas

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Courtesy MOCA Los Angeles

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The artist Stan Douglas uses as inspiration D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which is credited with stoking the rise of the Ku Klux Klan soon after. Douglas creates new sequences and characters who are played by Black actors.

“I think the exhibition [is] especially important to be seen here in Los Angeles because there aren't many Confederate monuments” in Southern California, said L.A. based artist Alison Saar, who does not have work in the show.

“To be in the presence of these objects was really frightening and moving,” Saar added.

The oldest monument in the show is an 1887 statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision. The newest depicts North Carolina newspaper editor and diplomat Josephus Daniels, who was a white supremacist. His family commissioned the statue in 1985. Descendants of Daniels decided to remove the statue from public display in 2020.