Removed from city-owned locations eight years ago this month, Baltimore’s Confederate monuments will return to public view when a highly-anticipated museum exhibit opens in Los Angeles this fall.
‘MONUMENTS’ is the title of the exhibit, which will open on Oct. 23 and run until April 12, 2026, in The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, part of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
The exhibit, eight years in the making, is co-organized and co-presented by MOCA and The Brick, a non-profit visual art space formerly known as LAXART.
According to the organizers, the exhibit will present more than a dozen Confederate monuments from around the U.S. that have been removed from public view and are on loan from cities, museums and other owners. While some are unmarred, others have been splattered with paint or otherwise vandalized and weren’t repaired or cleaned up for the exhibit.
These monuments will be paired for the exhibition with works by emerging and established contemporary artists. The idea is to bring together monuments that were created to honor leaders and heroes of the Confederacy and put them in a broader context by juxtaposing them with works by artists who were born long after slavery was abolished. The larger goal is to spark a national dialogue on race and power.
“MONUMENTS marks the recent wave of monument removals as a historic moment,” the organizers say on the MOCA and Brick websites. “The exhibition reflects on the histories and legacies of post-Civil War America as they continue to resonate today. It brings together a selection of decommissioned statues, many of which are Confederate, with contemporary artworks borrowed and commissioned for the occasion.”
The decommissioned works “illustrate the evolution of the Confederate monument from its roots in a funerary impulse to its rise as a crystalline symbol of a white supremacist ideology, whose obstinacy became increasingly conspicuous against calls for civil rights,” the organizers say.
Removed from public property
Nearly 200 Confederate statues and monuments have been taken down around the country in recent years, largely in response to protesters who say the works glorify people who owned slaves or supported slavery and that they shouldn’t be on public property. Many more remain standing.
Baltimore sent four city-owned works to Los Angeles for the exhibit. All were removed from public locations in the middle of the night on Aug. 16, 2017, after former Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered it. Officials in Baltimore initially refused the request to loan them for the ‘MONUMENTS’ exhibit but later changed their minds.
The Baltimore works related to the Confederacy include: the statue of Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson that was in Wyman Park Dell; the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument that was in Bolton Hill and the Confederate Women’s Monument that was near University Parkway and Charles Street. An image of the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, splashed with red paint following a Unite the Right (white supremacist) rally on Aug. 13, 2017, is featured prominently on the organizers’ websites announcing the exhibit.
The fourth work from Baltimore is a seated figure of former U. S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney that was on a pedestal in the north square of Mount Vernon Place. The Taney statue drew opposition because he issued the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, denying freed slaves citizenship in 1857.
Idea from Hamza Walker
The idea for the exhibit came from Hamza Walker, director of The Brick and a former Baltimore resident. The exhibit is co-curated by Hamza Walker; noted artist Kara Walker (no relation) and Bennett Simpson, MOCA Senior Curator, with Hannah Burstein, The Brick Curatorial Associate, and Paula Kroll, MOCA Curatorial Assistant.
Besides Baltimore, cities that loaned monuments for the exhibit include Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia; New Orleans, Louisiana, and Raleigh, North Carolina.
Contemporary works in the show are by Bethany Collins; Karon Davis; Abigail DeVille; Stan Douglas; Leonardo Drew; Torkwase Dyson; Kevin Jerome Everson; Nona Faustine; Jon Henry; Kahlil Robert Irving; Monument Lab; Walter Price, Martin Puryear; Andres Serrano; Hank Willis Thomas, Davone Tines and Julie Dash, and Kara Walker.
Lead financial supporters of the exhibit are the Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Additional support is coming from more than two dozen contributors, including The Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa Fund; Alicia Minana and Robert Lovelace; the Teiger Foundation; the Terra Foundation for American Art; Agnes Gund; Jamie and Robert Soros; Jeffrey and Catharine Soros, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
An opening talk with Hamza Walker, Bennett Simpson and historian Robin D. G. Kelley has been scheduled for Oct. 26, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. at The Warehouse at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 North Central Avenue in Los Angeles.
Back on display
The Los Angeles exhibit will be opening just as two works that had been taken out of public view are supposed to be going back on permanent display in the Washington area — part of President Donald Trump’s push to reinstate names and symbols that have been removed from public locations since 2020.
A statue of Confederate general and Freemason leader Albert Pike, toppled during the Black Lives Matter protests in June of 2020, will be returned to its original location near Judiciary Square in October, according to the National Park Service, and a large monument called the Confederate Memorial will return to Arlington National Cemetery in 2027.
Commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the 1914 memorial was removed in 2023 as part of an effort by Congress to eliminate Confederate imagery from military sites.
‘Baltimore Quartet’
Hamza Walker said in a 2021 interview with Baltimore Fishbowl that he was particularly interested in Baltimore’s monuments because he went to high school at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, has several generations of relatives in Baltimore and was familiar with the monuments and Pugh’s decision to take them down. He calls them “the Baltimore Quartet.”
Beyond his own connections to Baltimore, “they’re great examples” of works from the era, each different from the others, he said. While some cities’ Confederate monuments are relatively generic, either geometric shapes such as obelisks or figures depicting anonymous soldiers, all of Baltimore’s monuments have valuable backstories, he said.
“Taney, Stonewall and Lee are the known historical [figures],” he said. “Two of them are allegorical, which is interesting. There are historical reasons and art historical reasons. They’re prime examples of the Confederate century.”
Future unclear
Baltimore still owns the four works of art that were sent to California. After they were removed from public view in 2017, city and state officials attempted to find permanent homes for them but weren’t successful. They were being kept in a city storage lot before they were sent to California. Baltimore’s agreement with the museum curators calls for the four works to be returned to the city once the exhibit ends.
It’s unclear what will happen to Baltimore’s monuments after that. Eric Holcomb, the former executive director of the city’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP), played a key role in arranging for Baltimore’s monuments to be sent to California but has since retired from his city job. Besides the Mayor’s Office and CHAP, Baltimore’s Public Art Commission and the Maryland Historical Trust likely will be involved in determining their fate.
The Maryland Historical Trust is involved because it has a Deed of Easement that covers three of the four monuments on loan to the exhibit – every one but the Taney statue.
The assertion that Confederate monuments “illustrate the evolution of the Confederate monument from its roots as an effort to honor the dead to its rise as a crystalline symbol of white supremacist ideology” is fundamentally flawed.
Monuments, as static physical structures, do not evolve. What changes over time are the interpretations imposed upon them—often shaped by shifting cultural narratives rather than historical fact.
Regrettably, this alleged “evolution” has been fueled by misleading claims that attempt to link the dates of monument construction with periods of racial unrest. These claims, promoted by a discredited civil rights organization, lack historical rigor. A factual review reveals that the erection of Confederate monuments frequently coincided with the installation of Union memorials—both intended to honor the fallen, not to incite division.
The Los Angeles exhibition, rather than presenting these monuments as open to interpretation, appears to be a deliberate effort to advance a politicized and speculative narrative. It prioritizes ideological messaging over historical context, and showcases severely vandalized works not as art, but as props in a broader agenda.
History is both interpretative and revisionist. Properly contextualized, these monuments can help tell important stories, while serving as a catalyst for a much-needed public discussion on issues of race, class, and power. Baltimore prior to the Civil War was already home to the Nation’s largest “free black population”, which historian Ira Berlin seminal research and writing identified as “Slaves Without Masters” (1974). I am always reminded of the story W. E. B. Du Bois, told, as he approached age 80, as he vividly recounted his reaction decades earlier to a potential editor who, in considering one of his articles for publication, suggested he “leave out the history and come to the present”. As remembered by Du Bois in “The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History” (1947): “I felt like going to him over a thousand miles and taking him by the lapels and saying, “Dear, dear jackass! Don’t you understand that the past is the present; that without what was, nothing is?”
When these monuments return to H. L. Mencken’s “Queen City of the Patapsco River Mudflats”, rather than being returned to a City storage yard, let’s use them to begin a discussion W.E.B. Du Bois would welcome as long overdue.