Kara Walker’s ‘Unmanned Drone’ Reimagines a Confederate Statue of Stonewall Jackson
Installation view of “Unmanned Drone” (2023), bronze, 134 x 153 1/2 x 55 inches at The Brick. Photos by Ruben Diaz. All images courtesy of Kara Walker, Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, and The Brick, shared with permission
Kara Walker’s ‘Unmanned Drone’ Reimagines a Confederate Statue of Stonewall Jackson
November 10, 2025
ArtHistorySocial Issues
Kate Mothes
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In 2016, a high school student in Charlottesville, Virginia, launched a petition to remove a number of statues from public view. These included Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Thomas Jefferson, and others, a majority of which a businessman named Paul Goodloe McIntire commissioned in the early 20th century. Over time, these monuments were seen as glorifications of men who furthered Manifest Destiny and condoned slavery, and they continued as emblems of white supremacy.
When the Charlottesville city council approved removing some statues, counterprotestors filed a lawsuit to keep them. And in 2017, during a Unite the Right rally, tensions grew deadly when a man accelerated his vehicle into a group of people, killing one and injuring dozens. The tragedy was an inflection point, but the statues remained until the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, spurred by George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, again amplified the conflict on a national scale.
In July 2021, 100 years after its initial unveiling, Charlottesville removed the sculptures of Lee and Jackson. The former was melted down, and the latter was deeded to artist Kara Walker by way of a Los Angeles nonprofit called The Brick. It’s here, as part of the exhibition MONUMENTS, that Walker has boldly re-envisioned the statue as a potent symbol of transformation.
Walker is known for making work, often on a large scale, that engages with symbols and stereotypes of racism. Her monumental piece “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” installed in a former Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn in 2014, comprised a giant sculpture of a woman-sphinx.
With a kerchief evocative of Aunt Jemima, viewers were face-to-face with an architectonic, stereotypically racist interpretation of Southern Black women, especially the notion of the “mammy,” a loyal servant. Walker turned the tables on this image, monumentalizing her into not only a giant decorative confection but also a deity.
For the piece at The Brick, Walker similarly transfigures a symbol of oppression into a compelling, retributive, enigmatic form. “At 13 feet high and 16 feet long, the bronze statue portrayed Jackson spurring his steed, ‘Little Sorrel,’ into the heat of battle,” says a statement.
The reimagined statue, “Unmanned Drone,” dissects the original sculpture created by artist Charles Keck into an unsettling, Hieronymus Bosch-like composition. “Altered beyond recognition, it is, however, still horse and rider,” the gallery says. “Instead of charging into battle, Walker’s headless horseman wanders in Civil War purgatory, dragging its sword over a ruined battlefield.”
The Brick is curated by Hamza Walker—no relation to Kara—who has been collecting decommissioned Confederate monuments from cities around the U.S. Today, the statue of Jackson takes an entirely new form, recontextualized in a way that spins the power to harm into the power to heal. Taken apart limb by limb and reconstructed into a surreal, fragmented, spectral reflection on how the past is woven into the present, Walker contends with the relationship between history and legend.
The title, “Unmanned Drone,” refers simultaneously to aircraft controlled remotely and a kind of low, humming, almost physical sound. The artist is interested in the way that, like a device flying overhead or a deep, reverberating sound, the sculpture also “presses on you…it looms.”
In an interview with Hamza Walker, Kara describes the impetus for memorial statues as rooted in myth. These sculptures are “all about these sometimes misapplied desires—a desire for heroism in a time of poverty and abysmal lack of faith,” she says. “I wanted to deal with the material in a way that was also about the act of separation—separating man from horse and man from myth.”
MONUMENTS is a major group exhibition running concurrently at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, which pairs decommissioned historical monuments with contemporary artists as a response to the layered and living histories post-Civil War. The show continues in Los Angeles through May 3.
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