Baltimore’s four Confederate monuments are headed to California after all.
Mayor Brandon Scott said he has approved a request to lend the statues for display in a Los Angeles museum exhibit called MONUMENTS, which is being organized by an organization known as LAXART and is scheduled to open in the fall of 2023.
“We’re going to be sending them,” he said. “All of them.”
The approval comes six months after Scott turned down LAXART’s request to borrow the statues, even though other cities had agreed to make theirs available.
The mayor said he initially had questions about the loan request but his concerns have been addressed.
“We had to work through some things, but we decided to do it,” he said.
When the exhibit is over, the statues will come back to Baltimore and the city again will have to decide what to do with them, he said. “We’ll see what happens after that.”
Elizabeth Hughes, Director of the Maryland Historical Trust, also has agreed to the loan following a discussion with the board’s trustees last month. Hughes’ approval was needed because the Trust has a Deed of Easement that covers three of the four works of art.
The four monuments are the statue of Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson from Wyman Park; the Soldiers and Sailors Monument from Bolton Hill; the Confederate Women’s Monument that was near University Parkway and Charles Street, and the statue of former Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney from Mount Vernon Place. The Taney statue has been controversial because he issued the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, denying freed slaves citizenship in 1857.
The four statues were taken down nearly five years ago as part of a wave of removals of Confederate statues and other monuments from public property in U S. cities, following protests that they were symbols of racism and shouldn’t be displayed on public property.
Then-Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered that Baltimore’s statues be taken down in the middle of the night on August 16, 2017, after hearing that protesters might tear them down. She later said she wanted them removed from public view “quickly and quietly,” to avoid clashes.
All but the Taney statue are covered by a state easement that requires the city to maintain and preserve them and make them accessible to the public, and gives the Maryland Historical Trust authority to approve any proposed changes to their condition or location. They’re currently stored on city property out of public view.
More than 150 Confederate statues and monuments have been taken down around the country in recent years because of their racist associations.
The idea behind LAXART’S exhibit is to display toppled Confederate monuments in juxtaposition with newly-created works of art that “respond” to them and help put the historic works in a broader context. It’s the first exhibit that aims to bring decommissioned Confederate monuments together and pair them with new works in this way.
According to LAXART’S website, the exhibit will be at “LAXART and The Geffen Contemporary” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, a high-profile location, and will be accompanied by a scholarly publication and “a robust slate” of educational programming.
LAXART director Hamza Walker is co-curating the exhibit with noted artist Kara Walker (no relation) and MOCA’s senior curator, Bennett Simpson. Walker said last year that he hopes to bring about 16 works to Los Angeles – “if we got all our wishes” – and then commission at least seven or eight new works for the exhibit. He said then that he has been in discussions with six or seven municipalities about borrowing monuments plus two colleges, a museum and one family that possesses a monument he’d like to include in the exhibit.
Though based in Los Angeles, Walker has personal ties to Baltimore. He went to high school at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and has relatives in Baltimore. He was familiar with the monuments and Pugh’s decision to take them down. He refers to them as “the Baltimore quartet.”
Walker said he wanted to exhibit Baltimore’s statues because he believes they have an important story to tell.
“They’re great examples” of works from the era, and each is different from the others, he said. “Taney, Stonewall and Lee are the known historical [figures]. Two of them are allegorical, which is interesting. There are historical reasons and art historical reasons. They’re prime examples of the Confederate century.”
As part of his efforts to borrow statues for the exhibit, Walker told the mayor of at least one other city that Baltimore officials had agreed to make its monuments available when no arrangements had been finalized.
“To date, we have confirmed that Baltimore will lend us the four monuments they removed from around the city in 2017,” he wrote in June of 2021 to John Tecklenburg, the mayor of Charleston, S. C. In his letter, Walker said he was also seeking statues from Austin, Texas; Richmond, Va., and Durham, N. C.
Walker and his associate, Hannah Burstein, said in an email message today that they’re pleased Baltimore’s monuments will be part of the exhibit.
“We are so grateful that Mayor Scott (and the Maryland Historical Trust) agreed to loan the four Baltimore monuments that were removed in 2017,” they said. “The exhibition would not be possible without the support of municipal lenders who are willing to engage meaningfully with this difficult history to heal and move forward.”
Baltimore’s monuments are valuable additions to the exhibit because they “touch on many different aspects of the national conversation surrounding Confederate monuments,” they continued.
“Each is significant as an art object, having been made by prominent artists of the time and offer entry ways to talk about historical memory, use of public space, and the Lost Cause” – an interpretation of the American Civil War viewed by historians as a myth that attempts to preserve the honor of the South by casting the Confederate defeat in the best possible light.
As of this month, they said, “we have nine confirmed lenders to the show and some, like Baltimore, are loaning us more than one monument. We are still in negotiations with five other lenders. In total, we expect to have between 15 and 21 decommissioned monuments” in the exhibit.
Eric Holcomb, executive director of Baltimore’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, said Walker contacted the city after learning that Scott had declined his request to display the statues and asked the mayor to reconsider.
Holcomb said Walker’s correspondence was followed by another round of discussions involving LAXART, the mayor’s office, the city’s law department and the Maryland Historical Trust, and that led to an agreement this spring to send the monuments to California. Holcomb said one of the mayor’s concerns had been about the state’s easement and how it would affect a potential loan. He said LAXART has agreed to cover all costs for shipping the monuments to Los Angeles and back, and insuring them, so no taxpayer funds will be involved.
Holcomb said city leaders understand that the curators are highly-regarded, that their exhibit could make a difference in changing the way people think about race in America, and that it could be positive exposure for Baltimore if it’s part of the dialogue.
“This exhibition has the potential, the opportunity, to really lead this country forward in those conversations about race that need to be made,” Holcomb said. “The mayor had really good intuition, after hearing about what this exhibition is about, to say, yes, Baltimore should be a part of this…Once he understood that the bumps in the road were manageable to drive over, so to speak, he thought it was a great idea.”
Holcomb said exposure from the exhibit also could help Baltimore find appropriate permanent homes for the monuments. He said part of the story Baltimore can tell is the difficulty of finding fitting locations for the works that were taken down and the efforts Baltimore has made – efforts that haven’t yet been successful.
“We set up this whole process,” he said. “We had form letters going out to people who were interested in receiving these monuments. We called cemeteries with Confederate soldiers in them. We really tried. We had a list of 20-some places that had interest. Some were like the Jefferson Davis home museum. We even had a letter of interest from the Ku Klux Klan…We wanted to know what their interpretation plan was, what their siting plan was, how they were going to [move them]. We wanted to make sure that they had the right message.”
When the four monuments come back from being part of the Los Angeles exhibit, he said, “I hope they come back with a different significance – different meaning, different values.”
As works of art, apart from their role in celebrating certain individuals or groups, the monuments are impressive, he said.
“They are probably the most beautiful pieces of propaganda,” he said. “They are really gorgeous. If you see them on the ground, off their bases, walking around them, it’s a visceral experience. You just feel them in a different way.”
This will be the second time since 2000 that Baltimoreans have sent a historic artifact to Los Angeles to be put on public display. In 2002, the Archdiocese of Baltimore sent the original “cathedra,” or bishop’s throne, from Baltimore’s Basilica of the Assumption to be displayed inside a new cathedral in Los Angeles, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The goal of sending the historic cathedra was to make a symbolic connection between the first cathedral in America, the one in Baltimore, and the newest, the one in Los Angeles. It was returned safely.
