Breathtaking, unsettling, healing: a new exhibit by Black US artists transforms Confederate monuments

<p>The sweeping exhibition Monuments opens in Los Angeles on 23 October and is on view through May</p><p>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.</p><p>The statue of Robert E Lee, which had been surrounded by white men with torches in a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/dec/27/the-year-in-nazi-propaganda-images-of-white-supremacy-in-trumps-america">famous far-right propaganda image</a>, 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, which pledged to use it for “transformation, not further veneration”.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/17/los-angeles-confederate-monuments">Continue reading...</a>