Jon Henry, Untitled No. 9., Newburgh, NY, 2015. Difital Archival print on matte paper

Photo courtesy of the artist, MOCA and The Brick

Two remarkable art exhibitions open this week in Los Angeles, Monuments at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary and at The Brick gallery, and Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Phillip Guston at the Skirball Cultural Center. Both these exhibitions, planned separately and without coordination, confront the issue of white supremacy and reverberate from the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally.

Hank Willis Thomas sculpture, Installation view Monuments at MOCA Geffen Contemporary

Photo by Tom Teicholz, Courtesy MOCA, The Brick and the Artist

At a moment when discussion of America’s legacy of slavery is being erased from the Smithsonian and other national institutions, and the names of Confederate Generals are being restored to military bases and federal institutions, when DEI programs have been dismantled and removed from universities and corporations, these two exhibitions are not just acts of bravery, they are acts of resistance. Both highlight that when it comes to understanding our nation’s history and ourselves, and speaking truth to power, artists lead the way; and that change often happens first in California.

Monuments, on view from October 23, 2025, to May 3, 2026, at both the Geffen Contemporary Space in downtown LA, and The Brick gallery in Melrose Heights, presents decommissioned monuments on loan from cities and cultural institutions in Maryland, Virginia, Alabama and North Carolina.

Curators of MONUMENTS at Press preview, left to Right: Bennett Simpson, Kara Walker, Hamza Walker

Photo by Tom Teicholz

Co-curated by The Brick’s Director Hamza Walker, MOCA’s senior curator Bennett Simpson, and artist Kara Walker, the exhibition is a collection of deeply considered responses to the statues, some with their graffiti still in place, most removed from their pedestals. Contemporary works were commissioned from Bethany Collins, Abigail Deville, Karon Davis, Stan Douglas, Kahlil Robert Irving, Cauleen Smith, Kevin Jerome Everson, Walter Price, Monument Lab, Davóne Tines and Julie Dash, and Kara Walker. The exhibition always includes pre-existing artworks by Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Nona Faustine, Jon Henry, Hugh Mangum, Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano, and Hank Willis Thomas on loan for the exhibition. It is a staggering assemblage that will require several visits to absorb.

Kara Walker before her sculpture Unmanned Drone at The Brick in Los Angeles, Monuments press preview

Photo by Tom Teicholz

As the exhibition makes clear, most of the statues were not made before or during the Civil War or even right after. The majority of the statues were commissioned at the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the 20th Century – as a way to create a new narrative about the Civil War in which its generals were heroes, and the Confederate enterprise was romanticized as “The Lost Cause.” Most of the statues were paid for by groups such as The United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group formed in 1894 in Nashville, Tennessee, who sought to shift historical memory and national and local history away from a narrative of racism and slavery and instead championed white nobility and supremacy. Monuments claps back powerfully at their efforts asking us to consider our own silence and complicity and reminding us of our common and shared humanity.

Trenton Doyle Hancock in front of one his paintings at the press preview for Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston at the Skirball Cultural Center

Photo by Tom Teicholz

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Phillip Guston originated at the Jewish Museum in New York curated by Rebecca Shaykin, the Museum’s Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art.

Guston, born in 1913, grew up in a Los Angeles where the Klan was active. In the 1930s, Guston first made work with Klan figures at its center — however, a riot by actual Klan members destroyed the work. Thirty years later, mid-point in his career, Guston renounced making abstract expressionist art for works that seemed cartoon like and explored hooded Klan figures – both mocking them but also speaking to the racism latent within all of us.

Installation view of one of the artworks in DRAW THEM IN PAINT THEM OUT: Trenton Doyle Hancock confronts Philip Guston at the Skirball Cultural Center

Photo by Tom Teicholz

Trent Doyle Hancock, born in 1974, grew up in Houston Texas, discovered Guston’s work thirty years ago. His work has been in dialogue with Guston ever since. Hancock’s alter-ego, the comic book hero Torpedo man, confronts Guston’s Klan figures in ways that are both comic, dark, and that speak to the ongoing thread of White Supremacy in America.

Even more remarkable, these two exhibitions are opening shortly after The Broad Museum’s Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, in which Gibson recontextualized the statue, The Dying Indian by Charles Carey Ramsey.

For one such exhibition to open might be an anomaly. But for all three to be here in Los Angeles, and to speak with such a high level of artistry and so powerfully, cannot be an accident. California has not yet felt the full brunt of the present administration’s attempt to silence, intimidate, extort, and suppress those who would tell a more complete history of these United States.

Los Angeles has become an art world capital because we have the art schools, the museums, the galleries, and the collectors, as well as the artists who make LA home. Artists have always flocked to California because of a willingness to support creatives but also because of LA’s spirit of invention, and of self-invention. Los Angeles has become the place where artists can speak their truth, and these two newly opened exhibitions remind us how crucial their voice, their vision, and their artworks are to understanding our present moment, our nation, and ourselves. They set the example for all of us to become more engaged in our history and for each of us, in our own way, to speak out.