Smith, a multimedia artist who works primarily with video, took such a chilling warning seriously. “Vigilance is necessary against white supremacy,” she said. If God’s radical appearance on behalf of the rebels were truly imminent, we needed to get moving.
Smith’s piece—the lights, camera, hand—is an installation that debuted last October at the Museum of Contemporary Art, or MOCA, in Los Angeles. This female “spirit” is a bronze Confederate statue titled Vindicatrix, a reference to “Deo Vindice,” the Confederacy’s official motto. It translates God will vindicate. She once topped a towering Doric column that dominated the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, which was dedicated in 1907 on the Confederate president’s birthday, a day celebrated as Confederate Memorial Day.
Last December, I flew to Los Angeles for the show, keen on seeing the infamous, spooky Vindicatrix, which I had learned about through years of reporting on Confederate memorials. The beat has pulled me across the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia—but never to California, where the “spirit of the South,” a revenant unseen since the social justice protests of 2020, might reveal the zeitgeist of the whole nation.
“If God is coming to avenge the Confederacy or the South, or your racism, or whatever it is, we ought to pay attention. We better stand guard,” Bennett Simpson, a senior curator at MOCA, told me, as he nodded toward a televised hand looming above. “As if the finger’s gonna suddenly produce God, right? I mean,” he paused, and added with a little shrug and a smile, “it’s a farce.”
When “Monuments” opened, the coverage was quick, sweeping, and buzzy, confirming how sensitive issues of Confederate memory remain nationwide. The Los Angeles Times called it the “most significant” art show in the country. A Fox News op-ed said the work was “pure barbarism.” The New York Times called it the “year’s boldest show” and said it was destined to be disputed.
One gallery, for example, features a bronze giantess from Baltimore cradling her child, a dying Confederate soldier, evoking a pietà—Jesus draped over Mary’s lap—and suggesting that, like Christ, Confederate glory will be resurrected. Across the gallery, 14 selections from Stranger Fruit, a series by the photographer Jon Henry, line the walls. The work examines the pervasive violence Black men experience. In each photo, a Black mother poses—in a harvested field in Omaha, a parking lot in Miami—cradling her son’s body. The silent dialogue between the two works raises frank questions: Would the life of one mother’s son necessitate the death of another’s? Why is one death tragic and another routine?
Walker began envisioning the exhibition as soon as the monuments started coming down in 2015, after a white supremacist massacre at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, provoked the nationwide conversation about Confederate iconography. It intensified two years later, after neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville to defend a statue of Lee—where a counterprotester was murdered—and culminated in 2020, when an unprecedented number of statues were removed after the murder of George Floyd.
Other racial changes under the administration may be even more disturbing. An executive order targeting diversity initiatives led more than 1,000 nonprofits to scrub from their records references to racial inequity, ProPublica reported. Since that order, Black women’s unemployment rate has surged; the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, however, has invited white men to file claims if they think they experienced race- or sex-based workplace discrimination. Meanwhile, social media posts by the administration, most notably ICE recruitment flyers by the Department of Homeland Security, sample slogans, songs, and imagery from neo-Nazi books and white nationalist groups. And the Supreme Court ruled that federal agents could selectively target people who don’t appear to be American because of their race (that is, people who are brown), which a judge had determined was quite likely unconstitutional, as immigration raids intensified across the country.
It all creates the disquieting sense that some new and unknown epoch is around the bend.
Cauleen Smith had never heard of Vindicatrix, nor had she engaged much Confederate history, when Walker invited her to collaborate for “Monuments.” Her past works with film and textiles had examined issues like police violence against Black people, and Black culture in Los Angeles. But she was immediately captivated by the statue’s name: “She’s this symbol of purity, and she has the kinkiest—freakiest—name ever,” Smith told me, failing to keep a straight face. “How can I say no?”
The vision for Vindicatrix germinated after the turn of the century, as efforts to vindicate the Confederacy proliferated across the South. The work was championed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC, an influential women’s organization of rebel progeny who were devoted to valorizing and romanticizing their forebearers. The group propagated the “Lost Cause” revisionist narratives that elide the brutality of slavery and emphasize that the fight for states’ rights caused the Civil War. The myth vitalized Confederate white supremacy despite Confederate defeat, and the women disseminated it through mediums like children’s books (such as a defense of the Ku Klux Klan warning that Black men have preternatural attractions to white women) and Confederate memorials, especially those that revere heroes rather than simply remember the dead. The work accelerated after Reconstruction, coinciding with deliberate efforts to disenfranchise Black voters.
After the death of Jefferson Davis, Valentine worked with members of the UDC to memorialize the man with a hulking, regal monument: A colonnade formed a semicircle behind a statue of Davis with his arm outstretched; behind the figure, a pillar reached into the sky, crowned with Vindicatrix. As explained in “Shaping History,” an article by the Valentine Museum about the memorial, she symbolized the Confederacy’s successful postbellum rehabilitation—and with it, the tenacity of its white supremacy—and white women’s role in making that happen.
For more than a century, Vindicatrix bided time, pointing toward clouds drifting over the city; toward the moon, stars, and constellations. Until a crane operator rolled up in the summer of 2020, and the spirit of the South descended to the streets like the dove at Christ’s baptism, or the angel Satan falling from heaven. She’d been out of reach of the demonstrators who had already pulled Davis to the ground. Vindicatrix was hauled away and disappeared into storage—until she and Davis were shipped last August to Los Angeles.
So for “Monuments,” she left Vindicatrix untouched, but put her in a corner (near the bathroom) facing the wall, as though in detention for misbehaving. She believed Vindicatrix had been really misbehaving.
Smith wanted museumgoers to feel that the statue and its threats are still alive, so she illuminated the pointing finger with a glow of human warmth against a black backdrop. The livestreamed footage evokes horror film tropes. “It’s coming out of the grave,” she said. Vindicatrix is the dead that won’t die: The spirit of the South is now a haint. Smith named the installation The Warden, a reference to the name of the brand of CCTV camera she used in the piece, and observed that surveillance should not be mistaken for safety. In fact, its use confirms the opposite. The hand is a warning that we’re still on dangerous ground, Smith said, the idea stemming from her “gloomy understanding” that she’s been too optimistic about the country’s future.
But more fiercely, surrounded by her illuminated hand all afternoon, I’d been thinking of The Second Coming, by W.B. Yeats. The poem’s two stanzas conjure imagery redolent of Christ’s return as depicted in the Book of Revelation, when the Son of God descends from the sky to inaugurate the apocalypse. Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, during an era of profound unease, as revolutions upended Ireland and Russia, and while fascism was rising in Europe. It was the statue’s station as the “spirit of the South,” that evoked the poem’s reference to “Spiritus mundi”—the spirit of the world. But it’s the first two lines of the second stanza that keep the poem front of mind, for they nearly perfectly describe that finger haunting “Monuments”: “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”
The instruction of Vindicatrix—that a divine white supremacy will reconstitute—was not uncontested at “Monuments.” One gallery featured a film created at Mother Emanuel, the site of the 2015 Charleston church massacre, of a bass singer performing a chilling and looping rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.” It echoes through the museum as a sort of soundtrack to the exhibition. In the crescendo, the vocalist’s finger points toward heaven, an unintended rhyme with the hand of Vindicatrix, Walker, the curator, observed—a claim that the Lord is not exclusively the Confederates’, but he’s here in the Black church, too.
She also took on the idea in a meditative response to Vindicatrix with a towering assemblage of more than 40 charred china cabinets, backlit with an orange and purple glow. Her installation for “Monuments,” Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet), reimagines Richmond in 1865 after the retreating Confederates set it ablaze. The flames made me think of a hellish underworld. But as the title suggests, DeVille was thinking of the cosmos when she burned the cabinets and arranged them in the shape of Orion’s Belt. As she saw it, Vindicatrix was a hunter, like Orion, pursuing a dangerous divine order—the resurrection of her Confederate community, father, brothers, lovers—that, if achieved, would require the resubjugation of other people. The constellation is visible nearly anywhere on Earth, she observed, just as Vindicatrix’s “scary little finger” can be seen from just about anywhere in the museum.
China cabinets also evoke the domestic sphere of women, DeVille observed, and are storage places for heirloom valuables. They could be baubles made of porcelain, or they could be belief systems. She left empty these cabinets, which still stink of burned lacquer. “It’s a ghost house. Nobody’s here anymore,” she said, but “you guys keep insisting on reigniting these embers.”
A unique tangle of laws, politics, and public opinion binds what can happen to a statue in each state. In the years that Walker spent negotiating with communities about borrowing their monuments, he regularly encountered bureaucratic confusion over who had authority over them—the city or the county or the local UDC chapter? Both the confusion and the legal tangle reveal the grip that these symbols maintain, a grip I encountered when I began researching the fates of statues in North Carolina. Officials with about a dozen municipalities that had removed statues often told me their monuments were still in the purgatorial limbo of storage. Many had spurred lawsuits. Money was an issue. The subject was still touchy. Resolution was too aspirational. Just leave them out of sight, some community leaders hoped, and they’ll stay out of mind.
And in central North Carolina, there’s Valor Memorial Park, which (as I reported for The New York Times last October) might be the first major and successful effort to collect Confederate statues from around the state and restore them on private property.
Throughout the afternoon, as people gathered at picnic tables for grilled chicken and mashed potatoes, I spoke with about a dozen of the 100 or so attendees, who are thankful for the park’s commitment to honoring veterans and returning Confederate statues to public viewing. Their reasons were varied. Some said they understood why they were offensive and believed a private park like Valor Memorial was a good compromise. Others believe they’re works of art. Many said the monuments are a necessary part of local history, adding that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights, not slavery. I therefore believe them when they say they don’t see the monuments as white supremacist.
It was of a towering bronze angel with sweeping feathery wings clutching a stumbling, dying soldier. But it was removed from downtown in 2020 and later relocated to a nearby cemetery where Confederates are buried. He still goes to see it, but it’s surrounded by a fence, he said; “it’s like it’s in prison.”
A bit of research clarified my déjà vu. In the early 1900s, the sculptor had created two nearly identical statues: for Baltimore, and then for Salisbury. Twin angels of Confederate death who for more than a century immortalized their fallen in the town squares. A century later, one had made it to Los Angeles. The other was now imprisoned among the dead in North Carolina.
Los Angeles has always disoriented me. So colorful and smoggy. So sprawling with so much traffic. The artists and curators told me it was just right for “Monuments.”
The cab dropped me on an avenue lined with low-lying furniture warehouses, and a security guard greeted me outside The Brick. Another inside waved me down with a wand and checked my bag. The bulk of “Monuments” is at MOCA, but The Brick hosts the crowning jewel of the exhibition: the only monument that was legally given to an artist, becoming the only monument that was permanently changed. Its fate may be a Confederate sympathizer’s horror. On Facebook, Valor Memorial, the park preserving statues in North Carolina, posted a picture of the work and said: “This is why we do what we do.”
Charlottesville solicited offers from artists to reimagine the statue of Stonewall Jackson, and accepted a proposal by Hamza Walker of The Brick that it be given to the sculptor Kara Walker (no relation), who is renowned for evocative works that interrogate violence, race, and gender. She took a plasma cutter to the horse and general and rearranged their parts. Man became beast, beast became man. One reviewer aptly likens her finished piece to a centaur.
Visitors flowed through to see the sculpture, which Kara Walker named Unmanned Drone. Curator Hamza Walker told me that The Brick kept running out of brochures, that the door handle kept coming off, evidence of the show’s popularity. Along the wall, a display of Kara Walker’s sketches featured pencil scratchings that reveal her mind at work. Beneath a blueprint of the horse she scribbled “O.C.D.” and drew an arrow and scribbled “U.D.C.” A train of rhythmic thought I could follow. But from “U.D.C.” another arrow pointed to “Eurydice.” This one seemed random. Until I said it aloud. And then it made perfect sense: UDC sounds a lot like Ur-y-Di-Ce, the ingenue stuck in the Underworld. An official description confirms that the artist’s mind was occupied with the domains of the afterlife in her vision for the piece: “Instead of charging into battle, Walker’s headless horseman wanders in Civil War purgatory.”
When Richmond’s monuments were removed after 2020, the pieces were stored at an open-air municipal facility, which Cauleen Smith called “the boneyard.” It was on a tour of the lot that she saw Vindicatrix for the first time, shrink-wrapped on her side. “I couldn’t even see her,” Smith told me. “Then there’s all this beautiful cut stone that has really gorgeous graffiti all over it for yards.” Wildflowers grew among them. She said the relics had a sort of beauty.
But if America does survive, she continued, “It will mature into something that needs reminders of where we were.” If the day comes when the idea of white supremacy is a remnant of our past, she wants the ruins of these things to remain.
As I left the museum and returned to the warmth of a California afternoon, and then one red-eye later descended into a dawn blizzard over New York, I was still thinking about the show’s warnings, and its metaphysical imperatives. In times of trouble, I suppose our minds wander toward the transcendental. And I realized that just as Vindicatrix had appeared to Smith, a strange specter had recently come to me, too.
Along the road, the sweeping green fields seemed to rise up around me as I cut past clapboard homes and barns and silos. And coming around the curve I saw a black figure in the road. A dot that grew into a bird. And then another—two turkey vultures as tall as vacuum cleaners. They were pecking at a gray heap, but they took flight as the lump hurtled toward me and clarified. First, there was a vulva flanked by two deflated legs, and then an expanse of belly and a paw flung unnaturally over a red tear in the barrel chest where the vultures were eating. In my rearview, a tongue unraveled from the block head—a pit bull—whose wide smile carried a laugh of shock. I watched the vultures return to it through my mirror as the road took me around a bend.
Perhaps that was a sign that he didn’t belong to any house, I now realize, or to this world. Because the memory returns to me with the recognition that some folklores believe black dogs are supernatural apparitions—barghest, padfoot—and the omens of misfortune, or death. They appear to you before the end comes.
I suppose that’s how it goes sometimes, little dog. Sometimes we see the specter warning us of the second coming around the curve and we stand guard—become vigilant—lest we lose the world we’ve worked so hard to create. And then sometimes the specter comes too late. Sometimes our end is upon us before we know it.
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