Hurling monuments off their pedestals

AS CONFEDERATE MEMORIALS RETURN TO PUBLIC VIEW, A DARING NEW SHOW AT MOCA AND THE BRICK REDEFINES THEIR POTENCY

- BY JESSICA GELT

FOR THE PAST DECADE, Confederate memorials have been a flashpoint in America's heated culture wars. More than 150 statues and monuments were doused with paint, defaced and brought down by protesters, but in President Trump's second term, they are being reinstalled. A statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike is returning to Judiciary Square in Washington, D.C., and another, known as the "Reconciliation Monument," will be restored to Arlington Cemetery. The tumultuous state of affairs is supercharging a provocative, highly anticipated new exhibition titled "Monuments," featuring nearly a dozen removed statues, some towering up to 15 feet. The show, co-organized and co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick, runs through May 3, 2026.

“Monuments” was originally supposed to debut two years ago, and if it had, it would have entered a radically different political landscape.

“Suddenly everyone thinks that we're doing this in response to our president, which isn’t at all the case. This is more a case of the political moment coming around to capture us,” said MOCA senior curator Bennett Simpson, who organized the show alongside Brick director Hamza Walker, artist Kara Walker (no relation to Hamza), Brick curatorial associate Hannah Burstein and MOCA assistant curator Paula Kroll.

The urgent, raw and ongoing nature of the public debate around civil rights, made all the more incendiary by the Trump administration’s attempts to minimize the history of slavery by threatening to remove artworks related to it at the Smithsonian and national parks, contributes to the power of the exhibition, which juxtaposes the statues with art that elicits emotionally charged responses.

“This is an associative poetic art show,” Simpson says of the 18 contemporary participating artists.