In 2021, a nonprofit public art, history, and design studio called Monument Lab undertook a comprehensive study of 48,178 monuments across the United States. They compiled a top 50 list of individuals represented, such as presidents and generals, and found that 50 percent of them had enslaved other people. The report identified 5,917 monuments to the Civil War, but fewer than one percent of those mentioned slavery or abolition, most often instead memorializing the “lost cause” myths of the Confederacy.

Among these, a 1921 bronze monument to the Confederate general “Stonewall” Jackson had stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, until it was decommissioned in 2021. It was acquired by The Brick, a nonprofit visual arts space in Los Angeles, and given to Kara Walker to create a new work of art for MONUMENTS, an exhibition co-organized and co-presented by The Brick and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

Walker’s sculpture is a deconstruction of Jackson and his horse, cut and welded and reassembled into a Cubist form. She has literally dismantled the monument, removing its original power and making its inherent horror visible as a headless monster, retitled Unmanned Drone, lost in a Civil War purgatory.

Outside the gallery, the original stone plinth is split open on the ground. Its high relief angels now face down, and Walker’s silhouette of a Black woman, freed from inside the stone, faces upward. The false narrative of the lost cause is broken.

Unmanned Drone is singular enough to stand alone, and it is the only work on view at The Brick. In a different neighborhood from the museum and with free admission, The Brick helps to decentralize the exhibition and remove institutional barriers.

At MOCA, the exhibition brings together contemporary works with decommissioned monuments to highlight myths and omissions that have shaped national identity and historical memory. Removing the monuments from their original outdoor contexts helps to deconstruct the narratives that they were designed to perpetuate. 

Inverting the historical monuments, Karon Davis’s Descendant is a sculpture of her own young son. Standing on a pedestal, he holds out a miniature replica of the statue of John Hunt Morgan, the plantation owner and Confederate general still memorialized in Kentucky, like a rat caught by the tail.

A 1917 monument of a woman cradling a Confederate soldier misappropriates the pietà—a specific form of sculpture in which Mary mourns the dead Jesus—in juxtaposition to Jon Henry’s contemporary photographs of Black mothers cradling their sons at locations where police have killed Black men.

During the Jim Crow era, the traveling photographer Hugh Mangum captured portraits of both Black and white subjects on reused glass plate negatives. His multiple exposures reveal that many of the sitters, in the segregated South, had passed through his studio at the same time. These are portraits of the first generation born after slavery, a presence that monuments of the same era intended to suppress. 

In the last decade, cities across the U.S. have decommissioned hundreds of Confederate monuments, recognizing a landscape that has perpetuated a harmful perversion of history. This exhibition provides a platform to historicize these removals, and to challenge and correct those narratives, towards a reconciliation that is long overdue. 

MONUMENTS is on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick through May 3, 2026.

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The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles has acquired a work of performance art by the multimedia artist Xu Zhen. Titled In Just a Blink of an Eye, it is only the second performance for MOCA’s permanent collection of some 7,000 works of postwar art.

Xu Zhen lives and works in Shanghai, producing conceptual and critical works in painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and performance. In 2009 he founded the MadeIn Company – a play on the phrase “Made in China” – which engages in curatorial work, research, and publications, and releases works under the brand of XU ZHEN®. The company itself is conceptual, mimicking the expansion of capitalism and art markets in China, and making the artist a product of his own corporation.

The work at MOCA is comprised of four performers as living sculptures. They each appear to float in mid-air, with their arms outstretched and only a foot or two on the ground, frozen in the act of falling. While viewers walk around them, study them, and wait for movement, they remain completely still, staring up at the ceiling with blank expressions.

Even if viewers guess how the performers seem to float, and that they take breaks during the regular intervals when MOCA’s gallery attendants clear the room, the illusion is never broken. Our disbelief is suspended, gravity is defied, and time has stopped.

Xu Zhen: In Just a Blink of an Eye is on view at MOCA on Saturdays and Sundays through September 1, 2019.

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Last summer we explored designs and plans for The Broad: codylee.co/the-broad.

As the project nears completion, we had an exclusive sneak peek on February 15 in advance of the museum’s September 20 opening.

The Broad is a major addition to LA’s Grand Avenue cultural district that includes MOCA and the Music Center. The $140 million building was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with a “veil and vault” concept that permits natural light into the galleries. The much-anticipated museum opened for a preview this Sunday with a rare opportunity to see its third floor – an impressive uninterrupted 35,000-square-foot gallery space – before the installation of partition walls.

The building’s first and second floors are still under construction and unfortunately inaccessible. Rather than the stairway or cylindrical glass elevator that ascend through the vault at the core of the building, visitors on Sunday arrived at the third floor through a freight elevator that will soon transport works by Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Cindy Sherman for the museum’s inaugural exhibition.

The honeycomb-like exterior filters daylight into the third floor through the roof and glass walls on the north, east, and south sides. From inside, the veil provides limited views onto Walt Disney Concert Hall, MOCA, and The Broad’s new public plaza that has been planted with 100-year-old olive trees. LA’s perpetual sunshine, permitted through more than 300 skylights, is a primary feature of the gallery. The building’s scale and light conditions make it feel surprisingly understated and not at all austere.

For this one-day event, titled Sky-lit: Volume, Light, and Sound, The Broad commissioned two installations. BJ Nilsen’s DTLA was an audio collage of recordings from neighborhoods surrounding the museum, and after sunset, Yann Novak’s Stillness projected atmospheric images of Los Angeles and Seattle onto the gallery’s 200-foot west wall. The installations emphasized The Broad’s architecture, site, and environment.

When the museum opens in September, it will house 2,000 postwar and contemporary artworks from The Broad Art Foundation and the personal collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. It will operate with an endowment of more than $200 million and admission will be free. Sunday’s preview event sold out within minutes of availability and media buzzed with images all day. Meanwhile, a line formed across the street for admission to the final day of MOCA’s Andy Warhol exhibition.

See codylee.co/the-broad for our earlier post.

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Los Angeles. We use superlatives to describe its population, economy, climate, and traffic, and its museums are no exception. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the largest in the Western United States. The Museum of Contemporary Art has one of the world’s most important collections of post-war art. The J. Paul Getty Trust is the world’s wealthiest art institution. LA has an impressive list of museums. Some have plans to expand, and there are a few entirely new ones in the works. Our next series of posts will provide an overview of notable museum projects in LA.

Related posts:
New Museum in LA: The Broad
New Museum in LA: LACMA
New Museum in LA: The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
New Museum in LA: The Petersen Automotive Museum

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