When a monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville, Virginia, was decommissioned in 2021, curator Hamza Walker managed to find it and have it shipped to a warehouse in New Jersey. The relocation of this massive monument is no small matter, both legally and logistically. But once the work arrived, he gave it to the artist Kara Walker (no relation) and invited her to do with it as he wished at a foundry in upstate New York.
Since the 1990s, Walker has been deftly exploring the dark side of American history, changing its image until the violence underlying it is revealed. She approached the Jackson monument in a similar way, reassembling its parts into drone (2023), a 12-foot-tall statue integrating the general with his horse, named Little Sorrel. The sculpture will be on view through May 3 in an exhibition titled “Monument” at Brick Gallery in Los Angeles, directed by Hamza Walker and co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Amid federal initiatives to restore Confederate monuments to public view, Walker’s forceful rebuttal made at least one restoration impossible, insisting: We can’t put it back to the way it was.
Kara Walker: drone2023; Brick, LA.
Photo Ruben Diaz/Sikkema Malloy Jenkins and Sprüth Magers, New York/©Kara Walker
The Sorry Legend of Little Sorrel (Who Else?)2023–25, is the title of the print Walker contributes to this issue american art. This is a version of the ink painting she prepared drone. In both versions, we see Jackson no longer as a rider, but as a hybrid of riders—a gesture that pays homage to the ongoing mythology of the Civil War and is reminiscent of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. More simply, he is revealed as a grotesque monster, looming large but also arrested, perhaps even slumped, his sword dragging low on the floor. It is a monument, not to heroes, but to horror.
Walker’s title refers to Jackson’s famous little red pony – an animal that outlived not only Jackson but thousands of Civil War veterans before his death in 1886. Of course, he was far from the only surviving animal from that era.
