Heavy

in

more

ways

than

one:

Confederate

statues

hit

the

road

for

Los

Angeles

exhibition

The long-awaited exhibition Monuments, which opens this week in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) and the Brick, proves heavy in more than one way. It confronts themes of white supremacy and Black subjugation in America by creating dialogues between contemporary art and Confederate monuments that were dethroned and decommissioned during the racial reckonings of recent years. And the monuments themselves, though now in a museum setting instead of a park or public square, still have an unnegotiable, unmovable sort of heft.

“Those things were never made to be moved,” Hamza Walker says. “It’s not like a work of contemporary art, where everyone’s thinking: how big are the doors for that to go through?” To his point, Hank Willis Thomas’s replica of a 1969 orange Dodge Charger—an upended version of the General Lee car from the series The Dukes of Hazzard (in essence upending the adventures of the “good ole boys”)—was engineered by a Hollywood prop shop in 2019 to be moved and has been exhibited widely since. And Karon Davis’s new sculpture, Descendant (2025), is lighter than it looks, even though it shows a larger-than-life version of her son holding a tiny Confederate sculpture by the horse’s tail, as if it were a rat’s tail, flipping the script that monumentalises white bodies.