The Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) in Los Angeles has acquired Unmanned Drone (2023), a towering bronze sculpture the US artist Kara Walker made by dissecting and reassembling a decommissioned statue of the Confederate general Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. The 1921 monument, by Charles Keck, was one of two Confederate statues in Charlottesville, Virginia, that were dismantled following the “Unite the Right” rally of white nationalists in 2017.
Walker’s sculpture is currently on view at the Los Angeles non-profit space The Brick as part of Monuments (until 3 May), an exhibition also on display at Moca’s Geffen Contemporary location that examines the legacy of Confederate monuments and features contemporary artists’ responses to white supremacist iconography and statuary. Kara Walker co-curated the exhibition alongside The Brick’s director Hamza Walker and Moca’s senior curator Bennett Simpson.
Kara Walker, Unmanned Drone, 2023 (detail) The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Purchase with funds provided by Beth Swofford by exchange. © Kara Walker. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen.
“With the acquisition of Unmanned Drone, we are honoured to steward this epic and historic sculpture by Kara Walker,” Moca’s interim director Ann Goldstein said in a statement. “A searing and crucial statement about the legacy of post-Civil War United States, it is a profound work for this moment—and for the ages.”
In her sculpture, Walker has transformed the strident monument of Jackson riding to battle on his horse Little Sorrel into a Frankensteinian figure out of a Hieronymus Bosch or Giuseppe Arcimboldo painting. Unmanned Drone is a symbolically castrated, broken jumble of human and horse limbs that seems to simultaneously be moving forward and retreating.
In a pamphlet accompanying the exhibition at The Brick, Kara Walker tells Hamza Walker (no relation) of the impact of reassembling the monument’s bronze elements for her sculpture: “When it started to take shape, I was like, this is something that is actually terrifying to me. It isn’t just this benign horse and rider who symbolise these things, but it is this horror that has been enacted over our shared history, and our grandparents’ history, our great-grandparents, and our great-greats. It looms.”
Accompanying works by Walker at The Brick include elements of the monument that she has sand-blasted, painted and upended. Another Charlottesville monument, depicting the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, that also became a flashpoint for far-right rallies in 2017, has since been removed and melted down; its constituent elements are now on display at Moca as part of Monuments.
Cynthia Daignault, Twenty-Six Seconds, 2024 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Purchase with funds provided by Pete and Michelle Scantland. © Cynthia Daignault. Photo by Jeff McLane
In addition to Walker’s Unmanned Drone, Moca has revealed more than 150 works acquired for its permanent collection last year. They include Cynthia Daignault’s 486-panel painting Twenty-Six Seconds (2024), which depicts every single frame of the infamous footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination; the monumental installation was included in Moca’s major photorealism exhibition last year. Also joining the museum’s permanent collection is the video Red Green Blue (2022) by Paul Pfeiffer, who was the subject of an important survey exhibition at Moca in 2023-24.
Other works that have recently joined Moca’s collection and are being publicly announced this week include pieces by Shizu Saldamando, Takako Yamaguchi, Olafur Eliasson, Henry Taylor, Shizu Saldamando, Meriem Bennani, Suzanne Jackson, Julie Mehretu, Mike Kelley and Nairy Baghramian. In a statement, Moca’s chief curator and director of curatorial affairs Clara Kim said this cohort of acquisitions “reflects a sustained and deeply collaborative effort to think critically about what it means to build a museum collection in the twenty-first century”.
