From Monuments to Memory: The Melting of Robert E. Lee and the Art of Reclaiming History

In the fall of 2023, inside a Virginia foundry, welders in heavy protective suits fed fragments of a once-towering bronze monument into a 2,250-degree furnace. One by one, pieces of the Robert E. Lee statue — arm, leg, and finally his face — disappeared into the molten fire. As the metal glowed red, Lee’s mouth seemed to widen into a final, wordless scream.

The melting of the Confederate general’s likeness was more than an act of destruction; it was a symbolic undoing of a century-old myth — the “Lost Cause” narrative that glorified the Confederacy and distorted the Civil War’s legacy.

The Birth of a Monument, and of a Myth

Lee’s statue in Charlottesville was erected in 1924, during an era when the Ku Klux Klan was resurgent and Jim Crow laws ruled the South. These monuments were not remnants of the war but tools of propaganda, built to enshrine white supremacy.

Paul Goodloe McIntire, a local stockbroker and philanthropist, commissioned the Lee monument and donated the park that would host it — a public space carved out near a Black neighborhood. Black residents protested the statue for decades, but defenders of the Lost Cause persisted, describing Lee as “the most eminent Confederate hero of all” in official preservation documents as late as 1996.

Calls to remove the monument grew after the 2015 massacre of nine Black parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2017, the Charlottesville City Council voted for removal, prompting a rally of white supremacists who marched with torches, chanted “You will not replace us,” and killed one counter-protester.

Years of litigation followed before the statue finally came down in 2021. The city faced a new question: what to do with it.

From Lee to Liquid: Swords Into Plowshares

The answer came from the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, a Black-led nonprofit that proposed melting the statue and transforming its bronze into new art. Their project, Swords Into Plowshares — drawn from the biblical promise of peace — rejected the idea of simply relocating or contextualizing the monument.

“Recontextualization is not enough,” the center wrote in its proposal. “Even removed from its pedestal, the Lee statue remains an icon of violent white supremacy.”

The City Council agreed. In a foundry, workers purified the metal and poured it into molds stamped with a bird in flight — a gesture toward freedom.

Reckoning in Bronze

Across the country, curator Hamza Walker was watching closely. As director of the Brick, a Los Angeles arts space, Walker had long studied America’s struggle over its monuments. The wave of removals after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 inspired him to curate an exhibition that would place decommissioned Confederate statues beside contemporary works confronting the same history.

“This is one of the most significant things to ever happen in my lifetime,” Walker said. “It’s as if we’re trying to rip out the wiring of our national mythology and start over.”

Partnering with artist Kara Walker, he secured space at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and began collecting pieces — from toppled Confederate generals to local memorials stored in city lots. The exhibition, Monuments, opened in October 2024 after years of delays, security planning, and logistical challenges. It features 11 Confederate monuments and works by 19 artists.

A Museum of Ghosts

Inside MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary — a cavernous 40,000-square-foot warehouse once used to store police vehicles — the monuments loom large, their presence oppressive even in isolation. Blocks of granite from Richmond’s Lee pedestal still bear graffiti from Black Lives Matter protests: “Protect Trans Black Women.” “0 Days Without an Extrajudicial Execution.”

In another room, shimmering gold ingots stand where Charlottesville’s Lee once towered, recast from his melted remains. Nearby, a jar of dark residue from the smelting process sits atop a cobalt waste drum — a literal display of the impurities burned out of the metal.

For visitors who grew up under the shadow of such statues, the sight is cathartic. Yet the exhibition also asks a haunting question: even when removed, do these monuments still command power?

Art as Transformation

Among the works reimagining Confederate relics is Bethany Collins’s Love Is Dangerous, created from the pink granite base of a Stonewall Jackson statue. Collins, who explores the coded language of flowers, carved the granite into petals of the Carolina rose — a blossom that symbolizes both love and peril.

“It’s a language of violence and beauty, which is very Southern,” Collins said. She created 100 petals, marking the century it took for the statue to come down.

Kara Walker’s contribution, Unmanned Drone, goes further. Using 3-D scans and a plasma cutter, she sliced apart the Jackson monument, scattering its limbs and horse parts into a tangled, grotesque form — “an emblem of despair,” she said. “Stop trying to bring the Confederacy back. None of those parts are anything anymore.”

History, Rewritten in Fragments

As visitors move through the exhibit, the old Confederate Women’s Monument — once a vision of noble Southern suffering — now faces photographs by Jon Henry depicting Black mothers holding their slain sons, evoking the Pietà. The juxtaposition turns myth into indictment.

Nearby, artist Stan Douglas re-creates scenes from The Birth of a Nation, this time centering a Black protagonist who walks through history untouched by white violence. It’s a cinematic revision of America’s racial memory.

Walker sees the show as both memorial and mirror. “It’s not about now,” he said. “It’s about the last decade — about asking, is the past even the past?”

The Politics of Memory

The exhibition arrives in a climate of renewed historical revisionism. The Trump administration has moved to rewrite educational standards, remove exhibits referencing slavery and Indigenous displacement, and reframe history through “patriotic education.” The same impulse that once built monuments to the Confederacy is reemerging in sanitized forms.

Walker considers this context part of the show’s meaning. The bronze and granite here are not neutral — they are battlegrounds for America’s conscience.

A Dangerous Love

Collins’s delicate stone flowers offer a final metaphor. They recall the first Decoration Day in 1865, when newly freed Black Americans brought flowers to Union graves — an act that evolved into Memorial Day. Among those early mourners was a group of South Carolina women who called themselves the Patriotic Association. Their gesture claimed both grief and belonging in a country that had enslaved them.

“Love is dangerous,” Collins titled her piece. Dangerous, perhaps, because it demands transformation — the same kind that melts monuments and remakes memory from the ashes of denial.