Stonewall Jackson’s success on the battlefield made him an instant celebrity in the South during the Civil War. When he died at Chancellorsville in 1863, he became a martyr to the Confederacy, and some proponents of the Lost Cause posit the South would have been victorious had he not died. Memorials to the dead general cropped up all over the South, including Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, and Stone Mountain in Georgia. In Charles Keck’s equestrian statue, installed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1921 and removed in 2021, Jackson appeared charging into battle, his finely articulated horse in full gallop and the detritus of war—broken wagon wheels, dead brush, cannon balls—trampled beneath. Allegorical figures of Faith and Valor on the granite base alluded to the Lost Cause tenets often attributed to Confederate soldiers.

For MONUMENTS, Kara Walker transformed Keck’s monument by dismembering—literally—Stonewall and his horse Little Sorrel piece by piece with a plasma cutter. She reduced the statue to its commensurate parts, then welded them back together, reconfiguring the horse and rider into a colossal phantasmagoria. The horse’s front and back legs are fused at the haunches so that its stride is condensed to the back third of the statue’s ballast. The bodies of the general and his mount fold in on one another, turning the ubiquitous equestrian statue quite literally on its head. Little Sorrel’s nose protrudes perversely out of its own belly. This mass of limbs and Confederate regalia would not be out of place in one of Walker’s silhouette works, both tonally and compositionally. The work elicits horror, confusion, amusement, and awe—it is a spectacle in the truest sense of the word.

At face value, Keck’s statue memorialized a Confederate war hero. Its latent meaning, however, was clear to the Black residents of Charlottesville. It was commissioned specifically for a park built on courthouse-adjacent land that was seized by the county government from Black home and business owners with the claim that the area was blighted. Walker makes manifest the monstrosity of venerating Confederate figures—men who enslaved other human beings and fought for a white ethnostate that permanently inscribed chattel slavery in its founding document. With surgical precision, she has untangled the web of Lost Cause ideology and exposed it as the Frankenstein fabrication it truly is.

Often left out of the conversation around the removal of Confederate monuments are the granite bases. While the bronze likenesses of Confederate figures wield conceptual weight, their physical weight pales in comparison to that of their stone bases. In her nose-to-tail approach to repurposing this monument, Walker has created a sculptural installation utilizing sixteen tons of the granite base. She turned the carved slabs face down, exposing the pockmarked interiors that were once bolted to a concrete core. Then, using headstone fabrication processes, she sandblasted silhouette imagery evocative of the carved figures on the other side of the granite that is no longer visible to the viewer.