Kara Walker’s ‘Drone’ Reimagines Stonewall Jackson’s Confederate Statue – Huge

In 2016, a high school student in Charlottesville, Virginia, started a petition calling for some statues to be removed from public view. These include Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Thomas Jefferson and others, and most were commissioned in the early 20th century by a businessman named Paul Goodloe McIntyre. Over time, these monuments came to be seen as a celebration of the men who advanced Manifest Destiny and condoned slavery, and they remain symbols of white supremacy.

When the Charlottesville City Council approved the removal of some statues, counterprotesters sued to keep them. Tensions turned deadly in 2017 when a man accelerated his vehicle into a crowd during a “Unite the Right” rally, killing one person and injuring dozens more. The tragedy was a turning point, but the statues remained until the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis once again amplified the conflict across the country.

In July 2021, 100 years after they were first unveiled, Charlottesville removed the Lee and Jackson sculptures. The former was melted down and the latter was transferred to artist Kara Walker through the Los Angeles nonprofit The Brick. It’s here as part of the exhibition monument, Walker boldly reimagined the statue as a powerful symbol of change.

Walker is known for creating works that deal with racist symbols and stereotypes, often on a large scale. In 2014, she installed her monumental work “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” which included a monumental sculpture of a female sphinx, in a former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn.

Wearing a headscarf reminiscent of Aunt Jemima, the audience comes face to face with constructed, stereotypically racist interpretations of black women in the South, particularly the notion of “mother” as a loyal servant. Walker reverses this image, casting her not just as a giant decorative confection but as a god.

In The Brick, Walker similarly transforms symbols of oppression into compelling, vindictive, and mysterious forms. “The bronze statue, 13 feet tall and 16 feet long, depicts Jackson riding his horse ‘Little Sorrel’ into the heat of battle,” a statement said.

The redesigned statue “Drone” dissects the original sculpture by artist Charles Keck into a disturbing, Hieronymus Bosch-like composition. “Although it has changed beyond recognition, it is still the same horse and rider,” the gallery said. “Rather than charging into battle, Walker’s Headless Horseman wanders the purgatory of the Civil War, dragging his sword through the ruins.”

Bricks was curated by Hamza Walker (no relation to Kara), who has been collecting decommissioned Confederate monuments from cities across the United States. Today, the Jackson statue takes on a new form, recontextualized in a way that transforms the power to hurt into the power to heal. Unpacking it piece by piece and reconstructing it into surreal, fragmented, ghostly reflections on how the past intertwines with the present, Walker explores the relationship between history and legend.

The title “Drone” refers simultaneously to a remotely controlled aircraft and a low, buzzing, almost physical sound. The artist is interested in the fact that like a device flying overhead or a low reverberating sound, the sculpture also “presses on you…it looms”.

In an interview with Hamza Walker, Kara described the impetus for the commemorative statue as being rooted in mythology. The sculptures, she said, “are all about these desires that are sometimes misused – the desire for heroism in a time of poverty and a deep lack of faith.” “I wanted to approach the material in a way that related to the act of separation—separating man from horse, man from myth.”

monuments is a large-scale group exhibition, held simultaneously at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary and The Brick Museum, that pairs decommissioned historical monuments with contemporary artists as a response to the layered and living history of the post-Civil War era. The show will run in Los Angeles until May 3.