One Fine Show: “Monuments” at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary and The Brick
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Sometime after 2017, many journalists and some people on social media decided that museum exhibitions should address the events of the day. The problem with this idea was that institutional shows take years to develop, whereas the average news cycle has been shortened to a period of just a few hours. Now even shows with good and enduring ideas, like the recently opened “MONUMENTS” at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, feel tied to an issue that probably seems settled for the general public.
But “MONUMENTS” demonstrates that a juicy topic can be explored away from the headlines, especially with the right roster of artists. The show juxtaposes decommissioned monuments, many of them Confederate, with newly commissioned works by Bethany Collins, Abigail DeVille, Karon Davis, Stan Douglas, Kahlil Robert Irving, Cauleen Smith, Kevin Jerome Everson, Walter Price, Monument Lab, Davóne Tines and Julie Dash, and Kara Walker—all of whom have spent more time thinking about this issue than most of the formerly loud voices on this topic.
Walker certainly knows monuments—recall A Subtlety (2014) at the Domino Sugar Factory—and is listed as a co-curator of this show. Her Unmanned Drone (2023) sums up its thesis: it is constructed from a former equestrian sculpture of “Stonewall Jackson” dedicated in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1921, and decommissioned in 2021. Walker’s version is astounding, merging Jackson with Little Sorrel, his steed, so that the horse’s snout protrudes from between their four legs. In Drone, Jackson feels like he’s disappearing, his hand on the ground, his own empty pants pointed in the wrong direction and open so you can see how hollow they are. In an interview, Walker says her “violent remix” is appropriate for a man who was attempting to do the same to the country. I would extend the argument to the level of the medium, as well. A statue of a loser was already something that should not exist.
Collins has engraved the Jackson plinth with Carolina rose petals for her own contribution, a reference to the flowers that former slaves used to memorialize a prison camp for Union soldiers on the first Memorial Day in 1865. Other works address these ideas in a less direct way, as with Everson’s film Practice, Practice, Practice (2024), a portrait of activist Richard Bradley, who in 1984 scaled a 40-foot pole dressed as a Union soldier to tear down a Confederate flag outside San Francisco’s Civic Center. Irving’s New Nation (States) Battle of Manassas – 2014 (2024-25) offers three bronze tabletop sculptures taken from thousands of images of St. Louis County to commemorate areas where Black people have faced violence and led protests, the title a reference to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Their approaches differ, but each artist offers innovation about how the very concept of memorial structures should be tackled moving forward. Few propose big, monolithic statues, opting instead for meatier works that do a much better job of conveying ideas than the old monuments ever did.
“Monuments” is on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick in Los Angeles through May 3, 2026.