"In 2021, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, finally removed the Confederate statues that had inspired a series of violent and eventually deadly white supremacist rallies in 2017. The statue of Robert E Lee, which had been surrounded by white men with torches in a famous far-right propaganda image, was melted down. But the statue of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, which stood at the heart of a 2017 Ku Klux Klan rally, was given to a California-based arts non-profit,"
"Today, that same Jackson equestrian statue, chopped apart and reconstructed by American artist Kara Walker, is in Los Angeles, the centerpiece of a new art exhibit reckoning with the US's white supremacist monuments. Walker is famous for making art that grapples with racist images and archetypes, from her cavorting mock-historical silhouettes of plantation scenes,"
"For the new exhibit, Jackson and his horse have been cut into pieces butchered, in the words of co-curator Hamza Walker, into shank and round and rump and then put back together to form a disjointed monster. The beast-man rears into the air, spare limbs flailing. Each detail is disturbing: the rider's legs dangle backwards, with broken toes. His faceless head is perched on the beast's snout. A clenched fist has tumbled to the ground."
In 2021 Charlottesville removed Confederate statues that had inspired violent and deadly white supremacist rallies in 2017. The Robert E. Lee statue was melted down. The Stonewall Jackson equestrian statue was transferred to a California arts nonprofit for transformation. Artist Kara Walker reconstructed the Jackson statue, chopping it into parts and reassembling it as a disjointed, monstrous figure titled Unmanned Drone. The reconstruction includes backward-dangling legs, a faceless head on the beast's snout, and a fallen clenched fist. The work functions as a monument to the horror of American white supremacy rather than its myths. Curator Hamza Walker helped assemble the project.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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