Los Angeles is turning Confederate statues into an art exhibit

A massive monument to General Robert E. Lee that once sparked riots in the Virginia city of Charlottesville is now a pile of molten bronze artfully displayed in 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 equestrian statue with graffiti of Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the two 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 has worked for eight years to acquire and occupy the massive monuments amid lawsuits and the logistical challenges of moving tens of thousands of pounds of bronze and granite to Los Angeles.

“The idea of ​​turning these figures into lions. What did they believe? They believed in white supremacy. Period.”

Coming at a time when President Donald Trump is ordering statues and paintings of Confederate generals to be reinstalled, warring narratives of American history are at the heart of “Monuments,” which opens Oct. 23 at The Brick and Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The 18 decommissioned Confederate monuments are displayed alongside works of contemporary art. The massive graffiti-covered statue of Lee and Jackson, for example, stands next to a giant replica of the General Lee car 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 demolition 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 removed. Subsequently, similar statues sparked clashes in cities across the United States.

“Under this historical revision, our nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing freedom, individual rights and human happiness is being reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive or otherwise irreparably flawed,” President Trump wrote in a March executive order calling for the paintings and monuments to be reinstalled.

But Mr. Walker says putting Lee and Jackson on a pedestal — even though they lost the war — is racist and promotes Lost Cause ideology, which claims the Civil War was a noble cause for states’ rights, not slavery.

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

“If you can get them away from slavery, right, then you can present them as heroes even though they lost the war and were on the wrong side of history fighting for something that’s morally repugnant,” he says.

At the center of the show is “Unmanned Drone,” a fully reconstructed Stonewall Jackson sculpture by artist Cara Walker that transforms a horse and its rider heading into battle into a headless, zombie-like creature.

“The Southern vernacular would be ‘haint,’ which would be a ghostly form,” Cara Walker, who is not related to Hamza Walker, told the BBC when asked how she described the work. “It’s an attempt to reimagine Stonewall Jackson’s legacy as mythology, as a mythological bearer of white supremacy.”

Most of the monuments on display will be returned to the cities from which they were borrowed when the show ends in May. But Kara Walker’s sculpture will have to find a new home. And the bronze ingots from Lee’s molten sculpture will once again be turned 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, this narrative of a lost cause, and we’re cleaning it up,” said Jalain Schmidt, an activist and professor who was there when the statue fell in Charlottesville and when it was melted down in a secret foundry. She came to see him in his new look in Los Angeles.

Living in Charlottesville, she said the statue was always on the backburner 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 would celebrate someone who fought for slavery.

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

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

“Especially after Unite the Right, after we were attacked, well, clearly that was proof that 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 own health.”