Since 2015, amid ongoing reckonings with systemic racism, the United States has removed more than 150 of its civic sculptures, many of which presented Confederate leaders in the style of bronze superheroes. Meanwhile, Canada has toppled 13 of its own statues, including six tributes to Sir John A. Macdonald, who oversaw the creation of the country’s residential schools. Some argue that stripping away these signs of painful history ignores the opportunity to use them as prompts for reflection. But for a likeness to hold educational merit, it needs to be designed or displayed in a way that considers an individual’s true legacy.

This goal is precisely what “Monuments” — an exhibition on view until May 3 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary gallery (with additional works at a second venue, The Brick) — sets out to achieve. In addition to collecting 10 borrowed statues that once stood in cities like Baltimore, the show introduces paintings, films, sculptures and photographs by 19 contemporary artists who contribute additional, necessary context. “The works in this exhibition address the questions of who we want to be as a nation, and who and what is worth remembering, let alone celebrating,” says co-curator (and director of The Brick) Hamza Walker.

One powerful juxtaposition is the show’s pairing of two statues of Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson with Unmanned Drone, a sculpture by American artist Kara Walker that reimagines yet another decommissioned statue of Jackson acquired from Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2017, the city voted to remove that and other Confederate monuments, leading to the “Unite the Right” protest by irate white supremacists; after a civil rights activist was killed during a counter-demonstration, Donald Trump commented that there were “very fine people on both sides.” (The statues were eventually taken down in 2021.) Walker’s artwork deconstructs that fallacy, cutting the Jackson monument (which depicted the general atop his steed) into pieces and rearranging them into a violent, grotesque beast.

Back in the urban landscape, the Monuments Project launched by the philanthropic Mellon Foundation in 2020 works to ensure that commemorative sculpture “more accurately tells our collective histories.” So far, it has funded everything from a Harriet Tubman monument in New Jersey to the preservation and relocation of a sacred boulder on Kaw Nation parkland in Kansas. Separate from that initiative, a temporary Times Square exhibit this past spring presented a sculpture by British artist Thomas J Price, described as a reimagining of “both the monument and monumentality.” Depicting a casual, confident young Black woman, the statue was meant to feel familiar yet non-specific, exploring who gets to be placed on a pedestal. Another, permanent Price statue of a fictional Black woman was unveiled in the summer outside Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario on Dundas Street — a road that many are calling to be renamed in light of its own ties to a problematic public figure. If our cities are akin to a history book, then we are in the midst of writing a new edition.