The exhibition MONUMENTS, a collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), and The Brick, runs from October 23, 2025, to May 3, 2026, at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, gathering a group of decommissioned Confederate and Jim Crow–era public monuments alongside contemporary works that actively challenge them. Nearly ten historical statues and sculptural fragments — many scarred by protest, spray paint, and physical force — stand at eye level rather than raised on pedestals, producing an unsettling intimacy. Removed from civic context, their vulnerability overtakes any illusion of authority.
At the Brick, a monumental interventions shape the show’s uneasy triumph. The first arrives by fragmentation. Kara Walker’s UnManned Drone reassembles the shattered body of a former Stonewall Jackson statue not as salvage, but syntax: inverted, fractured, bristling with accusatory voids. Jackson’s disordered pieces operate as a \ weaponized negative space. Where public statuary once used absence to erase, Walker uses voids to indict. The sculpture’s meaning is not in the bronze that remains, but in the authority the bronze no longer holds.
The second work, by contrast, lands with a sly inevitability. Hank Willis Thomas’s A Suspension of Hostilities (2019) elevates a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T to monolithic monument scale while denying it the monument’s pose. At nearly 15 feet long, the car is neither airborne nor enthroned. It is withheld—clamped in conceptual suspension—presented horizontally on the gallery floor, stripped of nostalgic alibi. Modeled on the “General Lee” charger from The Dukes of Hazzard, the sculpture exposes how culture smooths hate into décor when myth drives the wheel. The car’s silhouette remains muscular, even gorgeous, but its defense is revoked. The white cube denies irony; the floor denies the pedestal; proximity denies innocence. Horsepower becomes torque. Americana “cool” becomes armature. What once outran accountability in pop culture is now immobilized for witness.
Co-curators Hamza Walker and Bennett Simpson conceived MONUMENTS as a public unburial, amplifying silence into interrogation. Some pieces in the show weigh up to 15,000 pounds, and travel requires heavy machinery, transport coordination, site preparation, and temporary road interventions. Their mass works as historical ballast, a literal reminder that inherited narratives carry weight even when discredited.
The curatorial thesis hinges on multiplicity rather than spectacle. As Walker has noted, these monuments contain overlapping stories that must be reckoned with directly, not revered from afar. By positioning them inside a museum’s moral and physical frame, MONUMENTS forces proximity to histories designed to dominate public space. The show does what public squares could not: revoke pedestal, isolate myth, and convert symbol into evidence.
For young art lovers and institutional audiences alike, MONUMENTS reframes material trauma — corroded bronze, fractured stone, desecrated inscriptions — into a contested archive. No object remains neutral. Each piece, whether historical or newly made, participates in a collective counter-narrative about memory’s infrastructure and justice’s visibility.
In the subdued halls of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, whitened stone and damaged metal no longer celebrate mythic “heroes.” They await something harder and more honest: civic and artistic reckoning, asking who earns remembrance, who inherits burden, and what role museums now play in revising America’s sculptural memory.