Kara Walker Rebuilds a Stonewall Jackson Monument Into a 12-Foot “Unmanned Drone” in Los Angeles
A Confederate monument removed from public view in Charlottesville has resurfaced in Los Angeles — not as a restoration, but as a radical reconfiguration by Kara Walker.
In 2021, curator Hamza Walker acquired a decommissioned monument to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson that had been taken down in Charlottesville, Virginia. The transfer was complicated on both legal and logistical fronts, and the sculpture was ultimately moved to a warehouse in New Jersey. Once it was secured, Hamza Walker offered the monument to American artist Kara Walker (b. 1969), inviting her to use it as raw material at a foundry in upstate New York.
The result is “Unmanned Drone(2023),” a 12-foot sculpture that recombines the monument’s components into a hybrid figure that fuses Jackson with his horse, Little Sorrel. The work is currently on view at the Brick in LA through May 3 as part of “Monuments,” an exhibition co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
For decades, Walker has been known for turning the visual language of American history against itself, exposing the brutality embedded in its familiar symbols. Here, the original monument’s promise of heroic permanence is interrupted by a new form that refuses commemoration as usual. The transformation arrives amid renewed federal initiatives aimed at returning Confederate monuments to public display — a political backdrop that sharpens the sculpture’s insistence that some objects cannot simply be put back into place, unchanged.
Walker has also extended the project onto paper. She contributed a print to Art in America titled “Little Sorrel, 2023–25,” described as a version of an ink drawing she made while developing “Unmanned Drone_.” In both the preparatory image and the finished sculpture, Jackson appears less as a commanding rider than as a horse-man amalgam — a distortion that gestures toward the mythology that has long clung to Civil War memory. The hybrid form also evokes the four horsemen of the apocalypse, recasting the monument’s equestrian tradition as an omen rather than a tribute.
The title “Little Sorrel” points to Jackson’s well-known “little red horse,” an animal that outlived not only the general but also thousands of Civil War veterans, dying in 1886. The reference underscores one of the project’s central tensions: how long the material and symbolic remnants of the Confederacy have persisted, and how stubbornly they continue to reappear in American civic life.
Installed in an exhibition pointedly titled “Monuments,” Walker’s sculpture treats the Confederate statue not as an artifact to be conserved, but as a structure to be dismantled and reimagined — a reminder that public memory is not fixed in bronze, and that the afterlives of these objects remain contested terrain.
