The long-awaited exhibition Monuments, which opens this week in Los Angeles on the Museum of Up to date Artwork (Moca) and the Brick, proves heavy in multiple means. It confronts themes of white supremacy and Black subjugation in America by creating dialogues between modern artwork and Accomplice monuments that had been dethroned and decommissioned through the racial reckonings of latest years. And the monuments themselves, although now in a museum setting as an alternative of a park or public sq., nonetheless have an unnegotiable, unmoveable type of heft.
Set up view of Monuments on the Geffen Up to date on the Museum of Up to date Artwork in Los Angeles Courtesy of the Museum of Up to date Artwork (Moca). Picture by Stefanie Keenan for Getty Photographs
Even after being knocked off their granite pedestals in Maryland or Virginia, these monuments stand as excessive as16ft and weigh in at as a lot as 15,000lbs, testing the capability of any museum to move and accommodate them. At varied openings and previews final week, the present’s three curators—the Brick’s director Hamza Walker, Moca curator Bennett Simpson and the artist Kara Walker—repeatedly thanked their hard-working staff of preparators. One of the crucial unwieldy sculptures, a double monument that includes Accomplice generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on mortgage from the town of Baltimore, required highway closures throughout transport and a cautious choreography of two Versa-lifts to place it into place.
Becoming the monumental statuary within the galleries was additionally a difficulty. Moca’s Geffen Up to date location, which was beforehand a police automotive warehouse, appears to be like prefer it was made for this work, with ceilings as excessive as 35ft. However the principle exhibition area of the Brick is just 14ft tall, and Kara Walker’s contribution to the present—her radical reconfiguring of an precise Accomplice monument of war-hungry Jackson on horseback (putting the horse’s neck and bridle on prime of the beheaded creature)—seems to scrape the ceiling. Three slices she took from the statue’s huge granite base, exhibited close by, weigh between 5,000lbs and 12,000lbs every.
Set up view of Monuments on the Brick that includes Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone (2023) Picture by Ruben Diaz. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins
“These issues had been by no means made to be moved,” Hamza Walker says. “It’s not like a piece of latest artwork, the place everybody’s pondering: how large are the doorways for that to undergo?” To his level, Hank Willis Thomas’s duplicate of a 1969 orange Dodge Charger—an upended model of the Basic Lee automotive from the sequence The Dukes of Hazzard (in essence upending the adventures of the “good ole boys”)—was engineered by a Hollywood prop store in 2019 to be moved and has been exhibited broadly since. And Karon Davis’s new sculpture, Descendant (2025), is lighter than it appears to be like, though it reveals a larger-than-life model of her son holding a tiny Accomplice sculpture by the horse’s tail, as if it had been a rat’s tail, flipping the script that monumentalises white our bodies.
Set up view of Monuments that includes Karon Davis’s Descendant (2025) Courtesy of the Museum of Up to date Artwork (Moca). Picture by Stefanie Keenan for Getty Photographs
Ann Goldstein, Moca’s interim director, says the set up course of for this present reminded her of the time in 1998 they needed to open up partitions on the Geffen to accommodate Richard Serra sculptures. And don’t trouble asking if Monuments is travelling. Goldstein says: “No, it’s right here, it’s the one place it might be.”
Monuments, 23-October-3 Might 2026, on the Geffen Up to date at Moca and the Brick, Los Angeles
