by C. Montague
I half-expected the national guard to be stationed outside downtown’s MOCA Geffen when I arrived to view their latest exhibition, Monuments⏤an exhibition showcasing decommissioned Jim Crow and Confederate monuments alongside works (both new and old) by artists responding to those monuments.
The exhibition, jointly curated by the Brick’s Hamza Walker, artist Kara Walker, and Bennett Simpson from the Museum of Contemporary Art, had been under discussion for almost eight years and had gone through several curatorial iterations before taking its current form. It includes 10 decommissioned monuments by now-forgotten turn-of-the-20th-century artists and works from 20 contemporary artists. Many of the monuments on view were removed and/or toppled during the protests following the murder of George Floyd by the police in 2020.
Most such monuments (including those here) were commissioned nearly half a century after the end of the Civil War as the Ku Klux Klan was growing and the Daughters of the Confederacy were manufacturing a legacy and mythology of-, for-, and around- the South and its “Lost Cause.”
Upon entering, the viewer is immediately confronted with a monument to Matthew Fontaine Maury (originally unveiled in 1929), a seated figure with an oversized globe to his back, created by sculptor Frederick William Sievers and the largest on view. Maury, a naval officer turned Confederate soldier from a prominent Virginia family, was known for both his work in oceanography as well as his staunch support of slavery and vocal advocacy of white international colonization. Maury’s monument, defaced with graffiti⏤its legs and torso marked and eyes and face spray painted in a clown-like yellow⏤seemingly without any other visible damage⏤sits squarely and prominently in a room surrounded by paintings by Walter Price of imprints of marching feet that have stepped in paint and then canvas. The canvases are placed high⏤above and surrounding Maury’s monument⏤giving the impression that those marching are going over Maury’s grave.
In another room, a 10-minute short film titled HomeGoing (2025), directed by Julie Dash, honors the victims of the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina where a white supremacist killed nine Black church goers. The film features opera singer Davóne Tines, among others, singing This Little Light of Mine and intersplices images from the church with images of the Angel Tree, a giant 500-year old oak tree in South Carolina. Both the song and the number of people shown singing it, undeniably lays witness to a community that refuses to be extinguished.
The real heart of the show is in a room devoted to Andre Serrano’s portrait photographs of individual hooded members of the KKK. They surround Edward V. Valentine’s toppled sculpture of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s first and only president, unveiled on Davis’ birthday in 1907. Although many of the monuments are painted over, this is the only one in the exhibition that contains visibly damaged and broken pieces, and it leaves the viewer wanting more. The graffiti feels like resistance—the violently horizontalized Davis feels like something more permanent. Kara Walker’s piece Unmanned Drone—a violent reconstructed equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson—is, perhaps unfortunately, shown across town at The Brick in a sister exhibition.
One can imagine that the original intention of the MOCA show may have been far more radical but it was likely dialed back over several iterations. However, this is still a vastly important show⏤slated to be on view for several months if no one demands its closure—and the fact that it feels even a little dangerous is food for thought in itself.
Image: Staff