The enormously complex job of moving Confederate statues to Los Angeles for Monuments show

"The long-awaited exhibition , which opens this week in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) and the Brick, proves heavy in more than one way. It confronts themes of white supremacy and Black subjugation in America by creating dialogues between contemporary art and Confederate monuments that were dethroned and decommissioned during the racial reckonings of recent years. And the monuments themselves, though now in a museum setting instead of a park or public square, still have an unnegotiable, unmoveable sort of heft."

"Even after being knocked off their granite pedestals in Maryland or Virginia, these monuments stand as high as16ft and weigh in at as much as 15,000lbs, testing the capacity of any museum to transport and accommodate them. At various openings and previews last week, the show's three curators-the Brick's director Hamza Walker, Moca curator Bennett Simpson and the artist Kara Walker-repeatedly thanked their hard-working team of preparators."

"Fitting the monumental statuary in the galleries was also an issue. Moca's Geffen Contemporary location, which was previously a police car warehouse, looks like it was made for this work, with ceilings as high as 35ft. But the main exhibition space of the Brick is only 14ft tall, and Kara Walker's contribution to the show-her radical reconfiguring of an actual Confederate monument of war-hungry Jackson on horseback (placing the horse's neck and bridle on top of the beheaded creature)-appears to scrape the ceiling."

An exhibition opens in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) and the Brick that relocates decommissioned Confederate monuments into museum galleries alongside contemporary artworks addressing white supremacy and Black subjugation. The monuments remain physically imposing, reaching up to 16 feet and weighing as much as 15,000 pounds, creating major transport and installation challenges that required road closures, heavy equipment and careful choreography. Different gallery spaces impose constraints: the Geffen Contemporary accommodates tall statuary while the Brick's 14-foot ceiling forces adjustments, as seen in Kara Walker's radical reconfiguration of an equestrian Jackson monument.

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