Since 2021, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and The Brick in Los Angeles have been planning an exhibition which seeks to re-interpret works of American history as totems of shame. The Monuments  exhibition set for this October, could showcase amazing Beaux Arts sculptures removed from their original locations. Instead, it will feature some paint-splashed monuments, replacing great works of art with political statements.

Removing sculptures and shipping them across state lines both endangers artworks and violates a curator's proper care as outlined in A Bill of Rights for Works of Art. The museums will include contemporary artists with derogatory themes, also debasing Southern history.

The museums’ mocking of certain Confederate sculptures by displaying them with graffiti or paint is reminiscent in spirit to the 1937 exhibition of artistic works labeled "Degenerate" by Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda in Nazi Germany. Goebbels publicly ridiculed and demonized modern art and artists. In this case, the opposite is true. Many historical  works, admired for generations, will be displayed fallen from their literal pedestals.

By exhibiting desecrated (euphemistically called “decommissioned”) works,  the curators privilege small numbers of protesters over the majority opinion who value the statues remaining in place. Further, the Brick and MOCA seem to tar anyone who believes that Confederate monuments represent funerary commemorations or fine art. The exhibition's curators crave significance, yet lash out against those who don’t agree with their rhetoric. Museum text touts recent monument removals as a “historic moment,” marking the “evolution of the Confederate monument” from its “roots in a funerary impulse” to its rise as a “crystalline symbol of a white supremacist ideology.” Funerary art is charged with “obstinacy,” “against calls for civil rights.” With such audacity, the exhibition will serve to stir up racial hatred. And, contrary to their claim of “robust scholarship,” the curators are off to an inaccurate start.

This exhibit sees statues erected during Reconstruction and after as “white supremacist,” but those sculptures can still have a commemorative aspect, listing regiments and names of the dead. During Reconstruction, veterans were dying out; families honored them. In 1907 the largest Confederate veteran reunion took place in Richmond for just that reason. Likewise, in Washington D.C., General George McClellan’s statue joined several already-completed Lincoln monuments. Impoverished Southern economies prevented widespread commemoration until the 1890s.

Ironically, The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a modern organization (with assets of over $5 billion) that vilifies the South, has for years labeled funerary Southern art as Jim Crow symbols of white supremacy because of the time period in which the statues appeared. Correlation of time does not prove causation. The SPLC omits the fact that money is needed to pay for memorials. They ignore the fact that Northern cities erected many classically-inspired memorials, and fail to explain how only the South’s statues are white supremacist. 

At a recent  NYU round-table, called De-commission, Seth Levi, chief program policy advisor at the SPLC, admitted that two-thirds of the public wants Confederate statues to remain standing. He said that is because they don’t know the Civil War was about slavery. Levi smeared mourners, claiming  if anyone wants to commemorate those who fought to defend slavery, then they're white supremacists. 

Levi’s organization is actively lobbying mayors and city officials to remove 2,000 Confederate statues and rename streets. Levi admitted the SPLC has been accused of erasing history but disagrees with the accusation. By removing public statues, the SPLC is also curtailing conversations about local history.

The Civil War was our nation’s most defining moment after the American Revolution, with nearly 800,000 dead. It reordered the nation’s structure from one of sovereign states to a united nation.

Post-Civil War sculpture was often also an expression of the City Beautiful Movement spurred by the Chicago’s World Exposition (1893) and a quest for American identity after so much death and destruction. Localities commemorated leaders first, such as Sherman (1903) and Sheridan (1908) in D.C., then the common soldier, such as Indianapolis’ 30-foot high “Soldiers and Sailors”(1902). Allegories of “Liberty,” “Victory,” and “Freedom,” shown in classical flowing robes, decorated fountains and memorials for civic uplift across the country.  

LA’s and the SPLC’s agenda disavowing legitimate commemorative aspects of Confederate sculpture is similar to Congress’s Naming Commission (2021), since ended. Proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA), the Commission accused the South of being traitors, without a trial. It provided over $2 million to the military to remove commemorative Confederate monuments and rename military bases. Moses Ezekiel’s Arlington Reconciliation Memorial (1914), a grave marker, was exempt in the legislation but removed anyway. Defend Arlington and other groups are appealing to the Supreme Court to restore the grave marker.

Exactly which statues LA’s exhibit will include is secret, but not the locations they requested -- all Southern locations. The exhibit’s budget is also mysterious, but is clearly immense in order to pay for shipping, insuring, and even purchasing pieces. One expense is known: $100,000 offered for Charlottesville’s Charles Keck magnificent equestrian statue of “Stonewall” Jackson (1921), and the Shrady /Lentelli Robert E. Lee (1924). Both were removed whole and stored after 2017 Charlottesville riot. The City Council offered only Keck’s Jackson to the LA exhibit; it gave the Lee to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which melted it. Donors to the Lee meltdown included George Soros, Melody Barnes, and the VA Council of the Arts.

Both statues represented not just their renowned riders but tributes to their famous horses as well, Little Sorrel and Traveler. Horses were critical in the Civil War. Equestrian statues have been removed from New Orleans, Charlottesville, Memphis, and elsewhere, obscuring the importance of horses in American history.

Other statues lent to Monuments include Richmond’s Valentine Museum paint-splattered Jefferson Davis Monument (1907) by Edward V. Valentine; and Baltimore’s “Soldiers and Sailors Monument” by Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl (1903), removed in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston church shooting event.

Charleston is regularly cited by the SPLC and the Valentine’s Director, Bill Martin, as the reason for Confederate statue removal. Other Confederate removals came after the riots of 2020. At that time police offered little resistance to the vandalizing. In Richmond, former governor Ralph Northam and former mayor Levar Stoney used chaos to remove most of the statues on Monument Avenue when the public had voted in every district in 2018 to expand the avenue’s sculpture program, and not remove any (Monument Avenue Commission Report, July 2018).

As to the exhibit’s funding, millions have been donated from various sources to enshrine the museums’ point of view. Major donors and their net worth include: the Mellon Foundation, $8 B; MacArthur Foundation, $7.6 B; the Ford Foundation, $13.4 B; and the National Foundation for the Arts, $121 million.

Given that these donations to the LA exhibit and to the SPLC, combined with the Federal government’s Naming Commission’s negative attitude and actions regarding Confederate monuments, is it reasonable to assume that some coordination exists between the private sector and the government, to thwart public will?

The Monuments exhibit raises many questions, including what will happen to the gorgeous Keck Jackson monument and other great Beaux Arts statues after the exhibit has ended. Sending Keck’s Jackson back to Charlottesville, given unfavorable amendments to Virginia’s War Memorial Protection Laws which allowed the town to destroy Lee’s statue, is certainly risky. The safety of other works to be sent to towns with irresponsible officials who have no appreciation for great art is also questionable. The public has a right to know ahead of time where their great works will be headed, hopefully not to oblivion.