“Monuments”

“Monuments” stages a confrontation of the sort that contemporary art tends to avoid. It does so by mixing exhibition genres; it is both a didactic thematic show of contemporary art and a historical display of artifacts and documents. This collision realizes a promise of urgency that political art rarely delivers on, and revitalizes the sense of physical force in the exhausted metaphor of “art as resistance.”

One of the exhibition’s defining juxtapositions appears near its center, where photographs from Jon Henry’s “Stranger Fruit” series (2014–21), depicting Black mothers cradling their sons at sites where Black men were killed by police, hang opposite a decommissioned bronze monument, Confederate Women of Maryland (1917). The sculpture, by J. Maxwell Miller, shows two women supporting the body of a dying Confederate soldier. Both artists borrow from the Pietà. Both seek to dignify loss through the posture of care. Both stake a claim to public space, though the difference in how they do so speaks volumes about power: Henry’s project is necessarily fugitive, while Miller’s monument was backed by money and municipal authority, designed to endure. Despite this discrepancy, the art of Black Lives Matter and that of the Lost Cause movement make the same demand of the viewer, using the same visual language and the same strategy.

Neither of these works can be considered good art. Henry’s compositions are frontal and plain, and his subjects play-act grief with the mawkishness of community theater. The work treats Black men as interchangeable, as if any body can be slotted into the role of the dead son. The Confederate monument fares no better. The features of the figures are dull, the rendering inert. Removed from its pedestal and placed directly on the floor, the sculpture loses its authority, allowing viewers a close look at its flaws.

“Monuments” is effective because it presents bad art. The aggregated clichés move the viewer with a melodramatic surfeit of feeling. The exhibition achieves, at the level of display, what political art is meant to do: it forces a confrontation with power and myth without resolving their contradictions. Some works manage this on their own. But the cumulative effect is stronger because the blend of propaganda and documentation, monumentality and performance, means that nothing is insulated from conflict.

The history of modern art is largely one of decontextualization—of removing objects from the world and placing them in the white cube so they can be appreciated for their formal qualities. This is what distinguishes the art museum from the history museum, which furnishes objects with context, embedding them in a world with a past. By mixing exhibition logics, “Monuments” treats everything as both art object and artifact. This approach is well suited to the subject matter. Confederate monuments, after all, should not really be judged as artworks, but neither are they historical documents. They present a distorted fantasy about the nobility of the rebellion’s “Lost Cause.” As curator Hamza Walker has said, they are objects of myth. Treating contemporary artworks as something closer to myth, news, or propaganda underscores the fact that racism and the legacy of slavery remain active forces in American life. “Monuments” shows these works not just as art but as action in public space, restoring a sense of agency (to the art, and to the audience) that conventional exhibition formats strip away.

Discourse surrounding work by Black artists has tended to focus on the tension between abstraction and figuration: the demand that artists speak on behalf of a people through representation, and the more radical demand that they eschew representation as it perpetuates a regime of surveillance and control. “Monuments” refuses to resolve this debate, presenting both minimal works and emphatically message-driven ones. Yet in this environment, abstraction tends to recede. Torkwase Dyson’s glossy black monoliths, solemn and self-contained, are easily overlooked. Walter Price’s response to the monument of Matthew Fontaine Maury that was removed from Richmond’s Monument Avenue in 2020 after being defaced by protesters takes the form of fluid, stained abstractions installed around the massive bronze. The anonymous graffiti that streaks hot red and yellow across the patina and gives Maury aquamarine racoon rings around his eyes is a more potent painterly gesture than anything on Price’s canvases.

The contemporary works that succeed dramatize their own internal confrontation. Karon Davis’s Descendant (2025) monumentalizes defacement itself. A whitewashed boy holds a Confederate toy soldier like a captured animal. The work adopts a posture from Monument Avenue while commemorating its undoing. Perhaps the most difficult work in the show is Andres Serrano’s 1990 series of portraits of Klansmen, where cold, calm eyes gaze out from the holes in shadowy robes. Taken by the same photographer who shot Jeffrey Epstein’s final portrait, the images refuse instruction. Are they documents, condemnations, or something more troubling?

At several points in the exhibition, flat-screen monitors display an image of a hand with an index finger extended upward. At a dead end of the show, its source becomes clear in Cauleen Smith’s The Warden (2025). Smith was given access to the Vindicatrix, also known as “Miss Confederacy,” the female figure that once crowned the Jefferson Davis memorial on Monument Avenue. Her raised arm is meant to signal the defiant belief that the South would rise again. Smith places Miss Confederacy in a corner, like a naughty schoolgirl, and turns a surveillance camera on her. While Kara Walker’s much-discussed commission Unmanned Drone (2023) involved deconstructing an equestrian monument to a Confederate general and remaking it as a monstrous centaur, Smith achieves a powerful effect with just a few tricks of stagecraft. Red and blue lights give the arm an ethereal glow, enhanced by the reflective black material covering the surrounding walls—similar to the surfaces in Dyson’s sculptures, but here used as backdrop rather than object. The raised arm is now under constant, distributed observation. Control, media, vigilance, and the kind of repetition that makes myth stick come into view all at once.

If art institutions want art to matter politically, they cannot avoid risk. They cannot rely on restraint or good taste. They must be willing to be blunt, to show bad work, to allow contradictions to stand. “Monuments” offers a model. By blending exhibition formats and refusing aesthetic comfort, it makes political art feel dangerous again—not because it persuades, but because it refuses to protect the viewer from the force of what it shows.