The Beheading of Stonewall Jackson

Artist Kara Walker is using the decommissioned bronze equestrian statue of Confederate general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson from Charlottesville, Virginia, as material for a new art installation. The work, titled Unmanned Drone (2023–2025), is the centerpiece of a major exhibition in Los Angeles called MONUMENTS.

The Stonewall Jackson monument was dedicated in 1921. It was taken down by the city in 2021 after years of controversy. The Los Angeles non-profit, The Brick (formerly LAXART), acquired the monument.

Dedication of Jackson Monument (Source: Encyclopedia Virginia)

According to the NYTs:

She made the work at a foundry in upstate New York. The first step in the process, she said, was ‘a really kind of gruesome beheading’ of the Jackson figure that she said left her unsettled. Though some people present applauded as the head came off, she said, ‘I actually felt like it was such a violent act that I was really uncomfortable with it.’ But she felt there was no alternative: ‘I knew that what I was going to do was going to involve not having the head in its right place.’

The artist chose not to visit Charlottesville to study the sculpture’s past or recent context. Rather, she decided to treat its theme as a symbol of the pervasive ideology of the Lost Cause across the South — the efforts to justify the Confederacy as honorable, long after the Civil War — and to focus on the object itself as a formal challenge.

‘This was basically mine now, my found object,’ she said, recalling her reaction when she encountered the statue in the warehouse in Newark. She resolved to treat it as ‘an object to be played with and contended with and wrestled with as an artist.’

Walker reconfigured the statue's bronze into a distorted new form, creating what has been described as a “melted mutant grotesque.” Walker called the new sculpture a “Frankenstein's monster of itself” and a “ghostly apparition.”

The artist has transformed the object's original intent, subverting its heroic “Lost Cause” narrative.

When Hamza Walker suggested getting Kara Walker a Confederate statue, she demurred — weary, she said, of the level of spectacle that felt unavoidable with this sort of work. ‘I’ve done monuments,’ she recalled telling him. ‘Please don’t make me sing.’ But faced with the Jackson statue, she relented, intrigued by the artistic potential of transforming it. ‘There’s something very satisfying working with the material, the object itself.’

As she developed her concept, the artist absorbed ‘Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man’s Friend,’ by Richard G. Williams Jr. — a 2006 apologia that presents the Confederate general as a Christian evangelizer who disliked slavery but defended it as part divine law, part subordinate to the cause of ‘states’ rights.’ To Walker, the book exemplified the layers of delusion in Lost Cause ideology. (She found it ‘charming,’ she said bitingly.)

Most revealing, she said, was the story of Little Sorrel, which became an object of fetishistic attention after the Civil War. Stabled at the Confederate Soldiers’ Home in Richmond, the horse was brought out for fairs and veterans’ events where people would pull tufts of its mane as keepsakes, even as it grew old and arthritic, eventually requiring a hoist to rise to its feet. After it died — from an inevitable fall, breaking its back — it was taxidermied.

In the equine energy of Unmanned Drone, Walker has channeled, ultimately, her sympathy for the animal’s plight, almost subsuming Jackson in the process. (Her research, she added, had her delving into equine anatomy and primers on how horses are butchered.)

Walker chose the name Unmanned Drone because it seemed “fitting somehow... As a weapon of war.” The title suggests the detached, remote nature of modern warfare, contrasting it with the romanticized grandeur of the Confederate monument.

(Source: The New York Times)

In addition, the artist created three related works from sections of the granite pedestal on which the statue once stood. These pieces feature drawn silhouettes and sandblasted stars, presenting a different reinterpretation of the monument's original stone.

The project moves beyond the binary of either preserving or destroying controversial monuments. Walker's approach presents artistic transformation as a way to “produce other kinds of aesthetic and political and narrative interactions,” opening up difficult conversations about American history and the legacy of slavery.

Additional photographs detailing the new scultpure, as well as the rest of this exhibit, should be accessible as we get closer to the opening of the exhibit next month.

I do hope that this exhibit has the opportunity to travel across the country. I certainly would like to see it. Having lived and taught in Charlottesville for eleven years, I regularly accompanied my students to the site of the Lee and Jackson monuments downtown to discuss the history and memory of the Civil War, the history of the Jim Crow South, and how to interpret monuments.

There is clearly still much to learn from these monuments.