In Downtown LA, MOCA’s ‘MONUMENTS’ Turns America’s Toppled Past Into Urgent Art

This article was originally published on 1 Minute Critic

When ICE was conducting unconstitutional raids across the country earlier this year, the people of Los Angeles took to the streets and made it clear that things needn’t look pretty on the outside if the system itself is crumbling within. After all, a little constructive destruction is the best way to get people talking. 

It comes as no surprise, then, that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Downtown LA is hosting the MONUMENTS exhibition to make the  United States confront its ugly past. Co-presented with The Brick, the show is composed of statues that were initially raised as symbols of glory, only to be toppled by the shifting tides of modern sensibilities. 

Co-curated by Hamza Walker, Bennett Simpson, and artist Kara Walker, the project presents these relics in their most literal form: bruised and battered by the evolution of morality, which is in stark contrast to the sanitized memories of the Confederacy (among other disgraces) that allowed them to be erected in the first place. 

MONUMENTS encompasses a compilation of the “vandalism” that set the country’s healing process in motion following the Charleston church massacre, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, and Bree Newsome’s removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House. Nearly 200 monuments were subsequently toppled, forcing Americans to reconsider whom we honor and why. This colossal cultural shift is precisely what the exhibition puts under the microscope. 

The exhibition also features new works by Bethany Collins, Karon Davis, Abigail DeVille, Stan Douglas, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Kara Walker, as well as borrowed works by Martin Puryear, Hank Willis Thomas, Andres Serrano, and others. These items have been positioned alongside monuments that have been decommissioned across the US, from Baltimore to Montgomery to Richmond, and beyond.

The uncomfortable yet necessary imagery illustrates a sense of hope fighting against a cumbersome history that may feel impossible to escape, but slowly surrenders its power.

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