In 2021, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, finally removed the Confederate statues that had inspired a series of violent and eventually deadly white supremacist rallies in 2017.
The statue of Robert E Lee, which had been surrounded by white men with torches in a famous far-right propaganda image, was melted down. But the statue of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, which stood at the heart of a 2017 Ku Klux Klan rally, was given to a California-based arts non-profit, which pledged to use it for “transformation, not further veneration”.
Today, that same Jackson equestrian statue, chopped apart and reconstructed by American artist Kara Walker, is in Los Angeles, the centerpiece of a new art exhibit reckoning with the US’s white supremacist monuments.
Walker is famous for making art that grapples with racist images and archetypes, from her cavorting mock-historical silhouettes of plantation scenes, to the shark-filled fountain she erected in the Tate Modern as a monument to the British slave trade. Her work made her the obvious choice for transforming a prominent Confederate statue weighted with many decades of violent history.