A year before we married in the city, we spent a Memorial Day weekend in New Orleans. We stayed at Hotel LeCirque. It stands on what is now Harmony Circle, once called Place du Tivoli. In 2010, it was still known by the name it had carried for more than 130 years: Lee Circle. As in Robert E. Lee, the defeated Confederate general.
Our room faced the circle, where the enormous statue of Lee, mounted on his horse, was perched, looking down upon us and all those who came to enjoy what is, otherwise, a wonderful part of my second-favorite city in the country. Every morning when I opened the curtains of our room and was greeted by the long-standing monument to a man who led armies that killed tens of thousands for the express purpose of keeping people who look like me enslaved, I cursed his name and flipped him off.
That twelve-foot bronze monstrosity celebrating “the Lost Cause of white supremacy” no longer stands atop that perch. It was removed in 2017 during the great reckoning around Confederate memorials that followed the 2015 Charleston church massacre. That moment of overdue accountability, in turn, provoked a surge of white supremacist counter-rallies opposing the removal of these monuments, culminating in the “Unite the Right” rally in August of that same year — an event that ended, predictably, in violence.
It should come as no surprise, then, that despite the threat of rain, we recently trekked to Little Tokyo for First Fridays at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to view MONUMENTS. The exhibition examines a decade of contestation over Confederate monuments in public spaces across the United States, pairing decommissioned statues with works by nineteen artists reflecting on the monuments themselves — and on what both their presence and their removal might mean. Robin D. G. Kelley has called it the most important exhibition currently on display in any museum in the nation, perhaps even the world.
Given the authoritarian tendencies of our current administration and the increasing comfort with which some Americans express supremacist ideology, I suspect he may be right.
While there are many monuments on display—several destroyed, dismembered, or defiled—the data reveals a more unsettling truth: four out of five Confederate statues in this country still stand. Though I delighted in being able to once again whisper “punk bitch” to statues of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and their ilk, the reality is that these losers are still honored as heroes in government-owned spaces—the people’s places—across this nation, and not merely in the South.
Inside The Geffen Contemporary, the people are represented by a wall of photographs taken by the nineteenth-century pop-up photographer Hugh Mangum. Despite working during the Jim Crow era, Mangum did not segregate his subjects. Everyday Black and white men and women gaze out from fragile glass plates, serving as witnesses to the era when many of these false idols were elevated in their name, supposedly for their benefit. The counterweight between these perspectives—common folk rendered vulnerable by time and decay, and monumental figures cast in bronze and stone—is striking. As in my memory of New Orleans, the gaze still moves upward, toward icons of oppression looming above the public.
Hamza Walker and Bennett Simpson, the curators of MONUMENTS, consistently juxtapose competing ideas. Nowhere is this more devastating than in the placement of white grievance in direct proximity to Black grief. It was impossible not to break down while watching Julie Dash’s short film HOMEGOING, in which Davóne Tines sings the souls of those murdered in the Charleston church shooting home. It was even harder to suppress the rage stirred by the glossy images of Ku Klux Klan members displayed in the very next room.
I was too overwhelmed by my visceral reaction to The Birth of a Nation to appreciate Stan Douglas’s reinterpretation fully. Still, encountering Descendant by Karon Davis—my favorite piece in the show—proved cathartic. The statue depicts a young Black boy, Davis’s son, with locs standing tall, holding a miniature monument of a Confederate General on horseback by its tail, as if it were vermin. The juxtaposition filled me with joy. When faced with the grave threat posed by the darkest hearts of our fellow Americans, Black folks have long mastered one enduring response: trolling.
After this whirlwind of emotion, Tiffany and I exited the museum ready to join the dance party promised as part of First Fridays. There was none to be found. BlackMuseumist was spinning, but the makeshift dance floor remained empty. Blame it on the rain. Or perhaps people don’t dance in public the way they once did, surveilled as we are from every angle.
We, however, would not be denied. After two-stepping to some rare grooves, we threw up a peace sign to the DJ. He answered with Fela Kuti’s “Water No Get Enemy.” Those afrobeat horns and drums got us sweating, shaking loose whatever heaviness had glommed onto us through the gallery.
MONUMENTS makes plain the weight of what this country refuses to reckon with. Our most violent truths occupy the public square. The hatred is sanctioned. The cruelty is celebrated.
Still, we dance.
