In June 2021, leaders in Charlottesville, Virginia, put out an unusual offer: two bad statues, free to a good home.
The city council issued a request for proposals for statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, which had long been the focus of removal efforts by local activists, and served as the backdrop for the deadly white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in 2017. Despite the artworks’ ill repute, dozens of organizations and individuals expressed their interest in taking the disgraced monuments off the city’s hands, and the city received five formal bids.
The competition was steep: The Ratcliffe Foundation, which operates a historic home in Southwest Virginia associated with Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart, offered $50,000 to Charlottesville for the pair. The foundation also asked Richmond for all its Confederate cast-offs — protesters and lawmakers have removed 18 of these monuments from the Virginia capital since June 2020 — in hopes of drawing tourists by relocating, restoring and preserving these relics in their original context as statues of men who fought to uphold slavery. But another group offered Charlottesville twice as much: The Los Angeles-based arts nonprofit LAXART bid $100,000 for both statues, with the hope of showcasing them in a major show of Black contemporary art next year.
In the end, the city chose two winners. On Dec. 7, the Charlottesville City Council voted to donate the Lee memorial to a local party, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which plans to melt down the equestrian statue and use the bronze to build something new. The Stonewall Jackson statue is likely heading to the exhibit in L.A., according to a report by the NBC affiliate in Charlottesville.
Confederate monuments belong in a museum, not on a trash heap: That’s a common refrain about the memorials coming down all over the U.S. Stewards of southern heritage have long called for history-minded foundations and institutions to make room for these now-polarizing tributes to the Confederacy. But the meaning of this argument is changing. Some curators are embracing this approach if only to provide critical historical context for the Jim Crow era that gave rise to these memorials, while others want to give the statues a more sympathetic second act. The case for preservation has been taken up by The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, and other publications. “The indecent monuments deserve a decent burial,” Christopher Knight wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
Cries to consign Confederate statues to museum cold storage once served as a sort of apologetic defense for these monuments, especially compared to those of racial justice activists who favored outright destruction. Removing them to a museum was a mushy compromise solution that was unlikely to ever come to pass. Before 2016, the issue was almost wholly hypothetical: According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, only four public Confederate memorials were removed in the U.S. between 1923 and 2015. Arguing that they should be shielded, not destroyed, was a way to cut short any debate about removing them.
Museums weren’t exactly clamoring for these memorials. “Are museums, in fact, the appropriate place for storing these gigantic homages — not even to the Civil War itself — but to the Jim Crow movements that fueled their commissioning and erection on state capitol grounds, university commons, city parks, and other places of power in the early decades of the 20th century?” wrote Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, in a 2018 essay. “And if so, what does that say about the popularly understood notion of museums as giant warehouses to conveniently store/hide/put things away that we don’t want to deal with?”
Now that these statues are actually falling — at least 90 monuments were removed in 2020 — decisions about their ultimate fate have become more pressing. Cities and states that are choosing to remove them before demonstrators do it themselves have to make a call. Instead of hiding them in a museum basement, some curators want to put memorials to the Confederacy on view in order to expose precisely the dynamics that Merritt describes.
One of the Charlottesville bidders, LAXART, has been looking to scoop up toppled Confederate monuments for an exhibit planned for 2022 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Kara Walker, the MacArthur-award-winning artist responsible for a sensational sculpture of a sphinx styled like a mammy and made of sugar, is co-curating the exhibit, along with LAXART director Hamza Walker (no relation). The group has already secured the loan of four Confederate statues removed by Baltimore, according to critic William Poundstone. (Once the MOCA show closes, of course, the question resurfaces: What happens next with these massive canceled statues, which the city stashed in a transportation yard since they were removed in 2017? Would Baltimore want them back?)
The LAXART curators are casting their net far and wide for Lost Cause idols. In a June letter to John Tecklenburg, Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, Hamza Walker asked for permission to borrow a statue of John C. Calhoun, the former U.S. vice president and ardent defender of slavery who architected the Nullification Crisis. The city removed the statue of Calhoun in June 2020, against the backdrop of national protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. It’s been sitting in storage ever since. The day before the statue came down, the city council voted unanimously to rehouse it in a museum or educational setting. The city wanted to give it to the Charleston Museum, but the museum declined the city’s offer.
While Calhoun died decades before fighting broke out in the Civil War, he certainly contributed to the conflict. And perhaps more importantly to the context of the show coming to MOCA, the Calhoun monument went up during the same Jim Crow-era fit of historical revisionism that saw Confederate statues erected throughout the South. “It is the monument’s history and its present-day ideological bearing that needs to be investigated,” Walker’s letter reads.
The show is still a work in progress: Hamza Walker didn’t respond to a request for more information, and a MOCA spokesperson said that dates and details are still being determined. Walker’s letter indicates that those plans include new works by the likes of Torkwase Dyson, Abigail DeVille, Ja’Tovia Gary and other prominent Black contemporary artists.
The range of options available to Charlottesville shows the nuance of the post-2020 debate about what to do with fallen memorials. Melting them down and remaking them as monuments to progress has a ring of poetic justice. Kara Walker and Hamza Walker want to use art and context to transform them. Some people who put in for Confederate statuary hoped to show them as they are, under the thin pretext of preserving history and drawing tourists. One guy wanted to relocate the massive statues of Lee and Jackson to his ranch in Texas. Another bronze Lee on horseback, which was removed from a Dallas park in 2017, ended up being auctioned online to a private buyer for $1.4 million; it’s now a putting green decoration for a Texas golf resort.
Curators elbowing one another to get their hands on these equestrian bronzes aren’t hurting for options. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced on Dec. 5 that the state is dismantling the graffiti-covered pedestal on which a monument to Lee once stood in a place of pride in Richmond. On Dec. 7, a loony-looking and an oft-vandalized statue of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest was removed from a private residence south of Nashville. The United Daughters of the Confederacy are fighting to save a Confederate memorial in Tuskegee, Alabama after a city council member tried to bring it down with a saw in July.
Efforts to demolish Lost Cause infrastructure across the country still have a long ways to go. About 700 monuments to the Confederacy remain, and some — like the giant bas-relief sculpture carved into Stone Mountain, Georgia — are unlikely to go quietly. Societies build memorials in stone and steel for a reason, so the ideals and figures they commemorate are hard to revise. By giving new meaning to Confederate monuments, artists and curators seek to do more than just erase the relics of these ideals — they’re tackling the ideas that they represent.
