Kara Walker

In Kara Walker’s practice, the possibilities of the readymade are expanded – through rejecting Duchamp’s aesthetic indifference to object selection. In contrast, Walker seeks out objects saturated with meaning, often carrying accumulated trauma, and intensifies them, transforming the historical object into evidence.

Written by Gina Fairley August 2026

Image credit: Kara Walker, Your World is About to Change, installation view, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, 2019
© Kara Walker

 

 

 

In 1921, an equestrian statue of the American Confederate General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson – a venerated slave owner and military tactician in the Civil War – was unveiled beside the Albemarle County Courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. A century later, it was toppled.
In the hands of American artist Kara Walker (b.1969), it would become the centrepiece of the landmark exhibition MONUMENTS, co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) and the not-for-profit organisation The Brick (formerly LAXART) from October 2025 to May 2026.

Walker, an artist whose 30-year career has exposed the fault lines beneath national mythologies, has persistently mined the psychological residue of societies buffeted by indentured labour, gender inequalities and racially loaded power systems. While her silhouette murals and drawings of the Antebellum South remain her signature, in recent years she has expanded into film and large-scale installations that pose questions for their viewers.

This is nowhere more evident than in Unmanned Drone (2023), a reworking of that 4-metre bronze monument to ‘Stonewall’ Jackson. Radically altering the public sculpture into a searing statement about post-Civil War mythology, modern warfare and the surveillance state, Walker takes this readymade on a less heroic ride.

Using digital technologies to map her intervention, Walker sliced the 4.45-tonne statue into fragments and reassembled them into a disjointed, spectral figure in which man and horse, weapon and regalia, are rendered functionless. The result is neither monument nor ruin. Instead, it appears suspended in a strange historical limbo; ... Subscribe to read all articles in full