LA turns Confederate statues that launched US protests into art

A massive monument of General Robert E Lee that once sparked riots in the Virginia city of Charlottesville is now a pile of melted-down bronze, artfully displayed in a Los Angeles museum.

Next to the sculpture are barrels of toxic “slag” leftover from the melting process.

Around the corner, there is a massive, graffitied equestrian statue of Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson – the two most famous Confederate generals in the US 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 been working for eight years to acquire and borrow 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 lionising those figures. 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, the warring narratives of American history are at the heart of “Monuments,” which opens 23 October at The Brick and at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The 10 decommissioned Confederate monuments are displayed alongside pieces of contemporary art. The massive, graffitied statue of Lee and Jackson, for example, stands next to a giant replica sculpture 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 criticised the removal and toppling of Confederate monuments, saying it’s revisionist history.

White nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, triggering deadly clashes, to keep the statue from being removed. In the aftermath, similar statues sparked clashes in cities across the US.

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

But Mr Walker says putting Lee and Jackson on pedestals – even though they lost the war – is racist and promotes the Lost Cause ideology that argues the Civil War was a noble cause for states’ rights and not about slavery.

“States rights to do what? The reason for the Civil War was slavery,” he said, adding that it perpetuates the idea that the South was a “noble victim”, and that slavery wasn’t so terrible.

“If you could distance them from slavery, right, then you could portray them as heroes, even though they lost the war and were on the wrong side of history, fighting for something that was morally repugnant,” he says.

The centrepiece of the show is “Unmanned Drone” – a completely reconstructed sculpture of Stonewall Jackson by artist Kara Walker, who transformed the horse and its rider heading into battle into a headless, zombie-like creature.

“The southern vernacular would be a ‘haint’, which would be a ghostly form,” Kara Walker, who is not related to Hamza Walker, told the BBC when asked how she describes the work. “It’s an attempt to rethink the legacies of Stonewall Jackson as a mythology, as mythological holder for white supremacy.”

Most of the monuments on display will be returned to the cities and towns they’ve been borrowed from when the show closes in May. But Kara Walker’s sculpture will need to find a new home. And the bronze ingots from the melted down Lee sculpture will be transformed again into a new work of art.

The statue was removed in 2021 and melted 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 lost cause narrative, and we’re purifying it,” says Jalane Schmidt, an activist and professor who was there when the statue came down in Charlottesville, and when it was melted at a secret foundry. She came to see it in its new form in Los Angeles.

Living in Charlottesville, she said, the statue was always in the background until a teenage girl in 2016 started a petition 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 the focal point for the Unite the Right rally in 2017, which turned deadly when a 21-year-old white nationalist ploughed his car into counter protesters killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal and civil rights activist.

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

“Especially after Unite the Right, after we were attacked, well, clearly this was evidence that, you know, 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.”