The Lost Cause Gets a Tinseltown Makeover

Cauleen Smith recently encountered a terrifying specter. A spirit appeared to her portending a divine promise, like a biblical angel to Mary or the prophets. The spirit was of a white woman in billowing robes, her hair tied in a chignon. And she said that God—God Almighty Himself—will descend from the heavens to the earth and vindicate the Confederate States of America. The rebel nation’s white supremacy will be magnified. Its racial violence will be justified. It will be retrospectively acquitted in the living memory of the world. Its policies will rise. A new dispensation will come.

Smith, a multimedia artist who works primarily with video, took such a chilling warning seriously. “Vigilance is necessary against white supremacy,” she said. If God’s radical appearance on behalf of the rebels were truly imminent, we needed to get moving.

So she assembled lights around the spirit, and focused a camera on her raised right hand, which pointed toward the sky to iterate her message. Then Smith settled in to watch the surveillance feed. Her eyes fixed on that bone-white hand where God would return. She watched and waited. He’d be coming. Any minute.

Smith’s piece—the lights, camera, hand—is an installation that debuted last October at the Museum of Contemporary Art, or MOCA, in Los Angeles. This female “spirit” is a bronze Confederate statue titled Vindicatrix, a reference to “Deo Vindice,” the Confederacy’s official motto. It translates God will vindicate. She once topped a towering Doric column that dominated the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, which was dedicated in 1907 on the Confederate president’s birthday, a day celebrated as Confederate Memorial Day.

Vindicatrix is serene with expectation, wielding a shield engraved with the battle flag. She is one of very few Confederate statues to depict a woman, an allegory of the rebels’ religious, racial, and, as Smith put it, “libidinal” values, earning her the nickname of “Miss Confederacy.” She was also considered the representation of the “spirit of the South,” and she is one of 10 decommissioned memorials now on display in “Monuments,” a groundbreaking exhibition by MOCA and The Brick, a visual arts space not far from Hollywood, that interrogates how Confederate imagery perpetuates the idea of American white supremacy. Its opening coincided with the tenth anniversary of the nation’s heightened reckoning with Confederate iconography, a reckoning that has left communities grappling with the fates of their statues, which enjoy the protections of not only their defenders but, in many cases, the law. The show is the first large-scale interjection in the debate over where these symbols belong in America’s landscapes; by juxtaposing them with art, “Monuments” invites us to consider the statues beyond the binary of take them down or leave them up.

Last December, I flew to Los Angeles for the show, keen on seeing the infamous, spooky Vindicatrix, which I had learned about through years of reporting on Confederate memorials. The beat has pulled me across the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia—but never to California, where the “spirit of the South,” a revenant unseen since the social justice protests of 2020, might reveal the zeitgeist of the whole nation.

In one sense, I found her everywhere at the museum, a modern facility with the industrial trappings of a warehouse on the edge of Little Tokyo, because Smith livestreamed the surveillance feed of the statue’s hand to monitors that were mounted throughout the exhibition: above a railing; by the gift shop; near an equestrian monument, which once towered over Baltimore, of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, with horses as big as elephants. “Beware Traitors,” a vestige of a protest, is painted behind their hooves.

“If God is coming to avenge the Confederacy or the South, or your racism, or whatever it is, we ought to pay attention. We better stand guard,” Bennett Simpson, a senior curator at MOCA, told me, as he nodded toward a televised hand looming above. “As if the finger’s gonna suddenly produce God, right? I mean,” he paused, and added with a little shrug and a smile, “it’s a farce.”

Sarcastic the installation may be. But its message—that white supremacy is enduring—was severe, and it imbued the entire exhibition with a foreboding gloom. I had watched Simpson lead a tour through the museum earlier, past a slab of a monument’s pedestal from Charlottesville, Virginia, that was eventually removed after the Unite the Right rally in 2017. “As White Supremacy Crumbles” was spray-painted over the granite. We might “think white supremacy was crumbling in 2017,” Simpson told the group, pointing toward the piece and the graffitied relic of a past social justice movement. “But again: hopeful, optimistic language of the time.”

When “Monuments” opened, the coverage was quick, sweeping, and buzzy, confirming how sensitive issues of Confederate memory remain nationwide. The Los Angeles Times called it the “most significant” art show in the country. A Fox News op-ed said the work was “pure barbarism.” The New York Times called it the “year’s boldest show” and said it was destined to be disputed.

Borrowing the monuments from communities across the country required complex negotiations; arranging them required scrupulous care to ensure they were neither defiled nor venerated. They are on the floor rather than on pedestals, underscoring their stunning sizes, and are in dialogue with other works by 19 artists, many of them original.

One gallery, for example, features a bronze giantess from Baltimore cradling her child, a dying Confederate soldier, evoking a pietà—Jesus draped over Mary’s lap—and suggesting that, like Christ, Confederate glory will be resurrected. Across the gallery, 14 selections from Stranger Fruit, a series by the photographer Jon Henry, line the walls. The work examines the pervasive violence Black men experience. In each photo, a Black mother poses—in a harvested field in Omaha, a parking lot in Miami—cradling her son’s body. The silent dialogue between the two works raises frank questions: Would the life of one mother’s son necessitate the death of another’s? Why is one death tragic and another routine?

“I don’t think it’s a contentious show,” said Hamza Walker, a curator, adding that people have been surprised that it’s indeed a serious art show, not a mockery. “This is what art can do,” he said, “if you let it.”

Walker began envisioning the exhibition as soon as the monuments started coming down in 2015, after a white supremacist massacre at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, provoked the nationwide conversation about Confederate iconography. It intensified two years later, after neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville to defend a statue of Lee—where a counterprotester was murdered—and culminated in 2020, when an unprecedented number of statues were removed after the murder of George Floyd.

But what makes “Monuments” most relevant to the moment are not these removals, but the reversals that have happened in President Donald Trump’s second term: His administration is returning federally owned Confederate monuments that were taken down after the 2020 protests; the names of Confederate generals that were dropped from Army bases were restored; a portrait of Lee was rehung at West Point. And more than reversals, the administration is also seeking erasures. An executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” required the Manassas National Battlefield Park to remove signage about postwar efforts to sanitize the Confederacy’s legacy. Brochures by the National Park Service at Medgar Evers’s home in Jackson, Mississippi, where the civil rights leader was shot in his driveway in 1963, reportedly no longer include the word “racist” to describe the murderer—who was a Klansman.

Other racial changes under the administration may be even more disturbing. An executive order targeting diversity initiatives led more than 1,000 nonprofits to scrub from their records references to racial inequity, ProPublica reported. Since that order, Black women’s unemployment rate has surged; the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, however, has invited white men to file claims if they think they experienced race- or sex-based workplace discrimination. Meanwhile, social media posts by the administration, most notably ICE recruitment flyers by the Department of Homeland Security, sample slogans, songs, and imagery from neo-Nazi books and white nationalist groups. And the Supreme Court ruled that federal agents could selectively target people who don’t appear to be American because of their race (that is, people who are brown), which a judge had determined was quite likely unconstitutional, as immigration raids intensified across the country.

The shock of swift transformation has induced an existential unease. The Atlantic wrote recently that threats to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments could revert the Constitution to its antebellum state; The New Yorker writes of doomsdayers prepping for a civil war; op-eds warning of the end of democracy have given way to op-eds outlining how that end is happening. In a stunning speech at Davos in January, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney made clear that, given recent shifts in U.S. hegemony, the world order is not simply undergoing a transition, but is “in the midst of a rupture.”

It all creates the disquieting sense that some new and unknown epoch is around the bend.

For “Monuments,” the political landscape changed drastically throughout its inception, development, and opening, making the show not a time capsule of a reckoning that is settled, but part of one that is caught in the widening gyre of a larger American crisis. “We are the subjects of history,” Walker said, noting that the curators had anticipated that the federal government might not react positively to the show. The New York Times reported that board members had had concerns that “Monuments” could create a problem for the museum. But so far, no trouble had come. “We’re not outside of it,” Walker said of the history unfolding around the country. “It’s going day by day, play by play.”

Cauleen Smith had never heard of Vindicatrix, nor had she engaged much Confederate history, when Walker invited her to collaborate for “Monuments.” Her past works with film and textiles had examined issues like police violence against Black people, and Black culture in Los Angeles. But she was immediately captivated by the statue’s name: “She’s this symbol of purity, and she has the kinkiest—freakiest—name ever,” Smith told me, failing to keep a straight face. “How can I say no?”

But only after Smith agreed to the project did she realize she couldn’t even touch the statue. It had been lent by the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia with protective sanctions that frustrated her. She’d had an idea of putting “something” on top of it, which she declined to specify for fear of making anybody “mad or, like, inflamed.” Like other Confederate statues, Vindicatrix is propaganda. But unlike many of them, which were mass produced, it’s a powerful work of art, Smith recognized, and she refused to embolden that power.

The vision for Vindicatrix germinated after the turn of the century, as efforts to vindicate the Confederacy proliferated across the South. The work was championed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC, an influential women’s organization of rebel progeny who were devoted to valorizing and romanticizing their forebearers. The group propagated the “Lost Cause” revisionist narratives that elide the brutality of slavery and emphasize that the fight for states’ rights caused the Civil War. The myth vitalized Confederate white supremacy despite Confederate defeat, and the women disseminated it through mediums like children’s books (such as a defense of the Ku Klux Klan warning that Black men have preternatural attractions to white women) and Confederate memorials, especially those that revere heroes rather than simply remember the dead. The work accelerated after Reconstruction, coinciding with deliberate efforts to disenfranchise Black voters.

At the center of this work, in the epicenter of the Confederacy—Richmond, the former capital—was Edward Valentine, a sculptor who spent the war studying art in Europe. Before Lee had even surrendered, he was defining the visual, racist imagery of how Confederates would be remembered, said a curator with the Valentine Museum, which is in the former home and studio of the sculptor’s family in Richmond. His statues stereotyped Confederate generals as magnificent, and Black people as lazy, obsequious, and incompetent.

After the death of Jefferson Davis, Valentine worked with members of the UDC to memorialize the man with a hulking, regal monument: A colonnade formed a semicircle behind a statue of Davis with his arm outstretched; behind the figure, a pillar reached into the sky, crowned with Vindicatrix. As explained in “Shaping History,” an article by the Valentine Museum about the memorial, she symbolized the Confederacy’s successful postbellum rehabilitation—and with it, the tenacity of its white supremacy—and white women’s role in making that happen.

A souvenir book for the monument’s 1907 unveiling explains that Vindicatrix had “the immortal spirit of her land shining unquenched” in her eyes, and her outstretched hand is an “eternal appeal to the God of justice and truth.” Above Richmond and its people, she will wait, “while time shall bide.”

For more than a century, Vindicatrix bided time, pointing toward clouds drifting over the city; toward the moon, stars, and constellations. Until a crane operator rolled up in the summer of 2020, and the spirit of the South descended to the streets like the dove at Christ’s baptism, or the angel Satan falling from heaven. She’d been out of reach of the demonstrators who had already pulled Davis to the ground. Vindicatrix was hauled away and disappeared into storage—until she and Davis were shipped last August to Los Angeles.

While ideating over how to reimagine Vindicatrix, Smith met the executive director of the Black History Museum of Virginia, which became the steward of Richmond’s removed Confederate statues. She asked her to lift the restrictions protecting the statue so that Smith could execute her potentially inflammatory vision for the installation. In response, she said, the director pulled out her phone and played the “obscene and grotesque” death threats she and the museum have received over the monuments. The issue was still a matter of life and death in Richmond. “I’ve been given the statue to play with,” Smith said, “but it’s actually a really, very serious undertaking.”

So for “Monuments,” she left Vindicatrix untouched, but put her in a corner (near the bathroom) facing the wall, as though in detention for misbehaving. She believed Vindicatrix had been really misbehaving.

The messaging of many Confederate statues can be vague enough to sustain debates over what they honor: history and ancestors, or a white supremacist nation. But the message of Richmond’s Jefferson Davis Monument was explicit. After an extensive evaluation of the city’s statuary, a special commission reported in 2018 that the monument was “the most unabashedly Lost Cause in its design and sentiment.” The inscriptions make no mention of slavery and characterize Davis as a great defender of states’ rights. And hovering above, Vindicatrix could be seen as a double threat: The power of God Almighty will be unleashed against those who resist white supremacist authority, and the invention of white female purity will continue to be weaponized to lynch Black men. For Smith, it didn’t get more toxic than Vindicatrix. “Even now,” she said, “this idea of protecting white womanhood is the libidinal engine that fuels so much racial violence.”

Smith wanted museumgoers to feel that the statue and its threats are still alive, so she illuminated the pointing finger with a glow of human warmth against a black backdrop. The livestreamed footage evokes horror film tropes. “It’s coming out of the grave,” she said. Vindicatrix is the dead that won’t die: The spirit of the South is now a haint. Smith named the installation The Warden, a reference to the name of the brand of CCTV camera she used in the piece, and observed that surveillance should not be mistaken for safety. In fact, its use confirms the opposite. The hand is a warning that we’re still on dangerous ground, Smith said, the idea stemming from her “gloomy understanding” that she’s been too optimistic about the country’s future.

Throughout the days I visited MOCA, the exhibition remained crowded. Parents leaned close with their children to examine the pietàs. In search of the bathroom, I found a tour group of about a dozen people huddled around the dark glow of The Warden. The guide invited them to analyze her. “It feels like the anti-Statue of Liberty,” one guy said. A young woman felt that the statue radiates ignorance, since its back is to the viewers. I thought of Lot’s wife—turned to a pillar of salt because she couldn’t resist turning to see Sodom and Gomorrah ablaze.

But more fiercely, surrounded by her illuminated hand all afternoon, I’d been thinking of The Second Coming, by W.B. Yeats. The poem’s two stanzas conjure imagery redolent of Christ’s return as depicted in the Book of Revelation, when the Son of God descends from the sky to inaugurate the apocalypse. Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, during an era of profound unease, as revolutions upended Ireland and Russia, and while fascism was rising in Europe. It was the statue’s station as the “spirit of the South,” that evoked the poem’s reference to “Spiritus mundi”—the spirit of the world. But it’s the first two lines of the second stanza that keep the poem front of mind, for they nearly perfectly describe that finger haunting “Monuments”: “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

That an exhibition about the South’s wounded memory is overwhelmed with a sense of the supernatural should not have surprised me. These are the spirits, religion, horrors, and revelations that distinguish the region’s art: the Southern Gothic of Morrison, Faulkner, and Hurston; the hoodoo of Jesmyn Ward. In her 1960 essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor observed that artists of the grotesque, a hallmark of the gothic, animate experiences we don’t customarily observe every day. Shock and abnormalities linger with us longer, especially when they expose our proximity to the spiritual realm. The South is “most certainly Christ-haunted,” she wrote, and “ghosts can be very fierce and instructive.”

The instruction of Vindicatrix—that a divine white supremacy will reconstitute—was not uncontested at “Monuments.” One gallery featured a film created at Mother Emanuel, the site of the 2015 Charleston church massacre, of a bass singer performing a chilling and looping rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.” It echoes through the museum as a sort of soundtrack to the exhibition. In the crescendo, the vocalist’s finger points toward heaven, an unintended rhyme with the hand of Vindicatrix, Walker, the curator, observed—a claim that the Lord is not exclusively the Confederates’, but he’s here in the Black church, too.

“How granular can we make this idea of God? That it is from only this one vantage point?” Abigail DeVille, a multimedia artist, said in an interview. “And we are the victor, and God doesn’t love anybody else but us?”

She also took on the idea in a meditative response to Vindicatrix with a towering assemblage of more than 40 charred china cabinets, backlit with an orange and purple glow. Her installation for “Monuments,” Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet), reimagines Richmond in 1865 after the retreating Confederates set it ablaze. The flames made me think of a hellish underworld. But as the title suggests, DeVille was thinking of the cosmos when she burned the cabinets and arranged them in the shape of Orion’s Belt. As she saw it, Vindicatrix was a hunter, like Orion, pursuing a dangerous divine order—the resurrection of her Confederate community, father, brothers, lovers—that, if achieved, would require the resubjugation of other people. The constellation is visible nearly anywhere on Earth, she observed, just as Vindicatrix’s “scary little finger” can be seen from just about anywhere in the museum.

On opening night, DeVille was standing near her installation, she recalled, when a girl carrying It, Stephen King’s sadistic horror novel, approached. She told her she really liked the work, and that it felt like a haunted house. (A haunted house features prominently in It.) DeVille—who described the girl as “so cute”—recalled replying, “Yeah, that’s the haunted house we live in.”

China cabinets also evoke the domestic sphere of women, ­DeVille observed, and are storage places for heirloom valuables. They could be baubles made of porcelain, or they could be belief systems. She left empty these cabinets, which still stink of burned lacquer. “It’s a ghost house. Nobody’s here anymore,” she said, but “you guys keep insisting on reigniting these embers.”

Though “Monuments” is the first of its kind, Walker says his hope is not necessarily to model what should be done with Confederate statues, but to showcase the kinds of conversations that are possible. It’s timely for communities across the South, where the debate abounds. In one messy situation in Alabama, for example, where taking down a Confederate monument could garner a $25,000 fine, a judge ordered the local chapter of the UDC to remove a statue in Tuskegee. Years later, for whatever reason, the monument is still in the town square but wrapped in a tarp. And in Virginia, a trial began last December in a lawsuit brought by the NAACP against the Shenandoah County School Board over its decision to return the names of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson to two schools, names that were dropped in 2020.

A unique tangle of laws, politics, and public opinion binds what can happen to a statue in each state. In the years that Walker spent negotiating with communities about borrowing their monuments, he regularly encountered bureaucratic confusion over who had authority over them—the city or the county or the local UDC chapter? Both the confusion and the legal tangle reveal the grip that these symbols maintain, a grip I encountered when I began researching the fates of statues in North Carolina. Officials with about a dozen municipalities that had removed statues often told me their monuments were still in the purgatorial limbo of storage. Many had spurred lawsuits. Money was an issue. The subject was still touchy. Resolution was too aspirational. Just leave them out of sight, some community leaders hoped, and they’ll stay out of mind.

But as cultural entities like The Brick and MOCA in Los Angeles and the Valentine Museum and the Black history museum in Richmond have looked to imagine a different place in American life for the statues, other organizations are trying to keep the future looking similar to the past. The UDC remains devoted to the Confederacy, but its numbers and influence have receded in recent decades. In its place, new initiatives are taking on the work. About two hours west of Richmond, a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans created Lee-Jackson Park in 2023, a site that plans to host a re-created statue of Lee, modeled after one that was removed in Richmond.

And in central North Carolina, there’s Valor Memorial Park, which (as I reported for The New York Times last October) might be the first major and successful effort to collect Confederate statues from around the state and restore them on private property.

In 2024, I began speaking with a park founder who welcomed me down for a ceremony to both commemorate Veterans Day and rededicate a statue the park had recently saved from Winston-Salem. So three days after Trump was reelected, I flew to Charlotte and drove into the countryside where the piedmont foliage was peaking. An inflatable Confederate soldier waved cars into a gravel lot, and a rebel flag splashed red across the sky over the property, where three statues that once stood around the state had been returned to their pedestals. By the end of 2025, the park had plans to restore five more.

Throughout the afternoon, as people gathered at picnic tables for grilled chicken and mashed potatoes, I spoke with about a dozen of the 100 or so attendees, who are thankful for the park’s commitment to honoring veterans and returning Confederate statues to public viewing. Their reasons were varied. Some said they understood why they were offensive and believed a private park like Valor Memorial was a good compromise. Others believe they’re works of art. Many said the monuments are a necessary part of local history, adding that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights, not slavery. I therefore believe them when they say they don’t see the monuments as white supremacist.

One reenactor was eager to speak after the ceremony, during which he and a squadron fired cannons. He spoke softly and earnestly, and his light eyes glittered against the gray of his uniform as he discussed his devotion to his Confederate ancestors and began telling me about a statue that once stood in Salisbury, about an hour north of Charlotte. He had to drive through the town for work, “and I saw that monument in the middle of the street,” he said, “and it was the most beautiful thing I thought I’d ever seen.”

It was of a towering bronze angel with sweeping feathery wings clutching a stumbling, dying soldier. But it was removed from downtown in 2020 and later relocated to a nearby cemetery where Confederates are buried. He still goes to see it, but it’s surrounded by a fence, he said; “it’s like it’s in prison.”

A year later and about 2,500 miles away, I thought about the reenactor as I toured “Monuments,” because among the memorials I saw a towering bronze angel with sweeping feathery wings clutching a stumbling, dying soldier. I knew enough about North Carolina’s regulations to know that no municipalities had lent statues for the show. And this statue was stained with blood-red paint that had been splattered during a protest.

A bit of research clarified my déjà vu. In the early 1900s, the sculptor had created two nearly identical statues: for Baltimore, and then for Salisbury. Twin angels of Confederate death who for more than a century immortalized their fallen in the town squares. A century later, one had made it to Los Angeles. The other was now imprisoned among the dead in North Carolina.

Bougainvillea bloomed down one side of the 101, and the other offered a panoramic view of the haze blanketing downtown, as a cab hauled me toward East Hollywood. The towers sliced through the smog as though stepping from a sauna, bathed in the pink glow rolling off the ocean. The city had been through it in the past year, seized by wildfires and ICE raids, becoming a testing ground for the president’s first-of-its-kind domestic deployment of federal troops.

Los Angeles has always disoriented me. So colorful and smoggy. So sprawling with so much traffic. The artists and curators told me it was just right for “Monuments.”

“I don’t think this is a show that could happen in the South or on the East Coast,” Simpson, the curator at MOCA, said. The museum had the logistical space—high ceilings and wide loading docks—necessary to host thousands of pounds of bronze and granite. The other necessity was also spatial: Away from the epicenters of the debates, the West Coast provides breathing room for people to have unmediated responses to the works.

The cab dropped me on an avenue lined with low-lying furniture warehouses, and a security guard greeted me outside The Brick. Another inside waved me down with a wand and checked my bag. The bulk of “Monuments” is at MOCA, but The Brick hosts the crowning jewel of the exhibition: the only monument that was legally given to an artist, becoming the only monument that was permanently changed. Its fate may be a Confederate sympathizer’s horror. On Facebook, Valor Memorial, the park preserving statues in North Carolina, posted a picture of the work and said: “This is why we do what we do.”

I met Hannah Burstein, a curatorial associate, inside, where the brick walls and skylight among the wood beams suggested the space was once a warehouse. Burstein worked closely with communities over the past six years to receive monuments, especially with Charlottesville, where the deadly Unite the Right rally erupted in 2017 over a statue of Lee. “It was an incredibly traumatizing event for the city,” she said. “For that reason specifically, that’s why the city was able to say, ‘Get the shit out of here.’”

Charlottesville solicited offers from artists to reimagine the statue of Stonewall Jackson, and accepted a proposal by Hamza Walker of The Brick that it be given to the sculptor Kara Walker (no relation), who is renowned for evocative works that interrogate violence, race, and gender. She took a plasma cutter to the horse and general and rearranged their parts. Man became beast, beast became man. One reviewer aptly likens her finished piece to a centaur.

She realigned the statue from the x axis to the y, so that the creature is now top heavy, supported only by the rickety horse legs that seem to wobble beneath the weight of what Jackson has become. Burstein led me around the monster that now towers in The Brick. A horse ear comes out of a riding boot. A muzzle breaches from what might have been the saddle. The tail emerges from I really don’t know what. The whole thing seems to scream. Many elements face backward from the direction it now moves, as though it’s tormented by an internal tug-of-war.

Visitors flowed through to see the sculpture, which Kara Walker named Unmanned Drone. Curator Hamza Walker told me that The Brick kept running out of brochures, that the door handle kept coming off, evidence of the show’s popularity. Along the wall, a display of Kara Walker’s sketches featured pencil scratchings that reveal her mind at work. Beneath a blueprint of the horse she scribbled “O.C.D.” and drew an arrow and scribbled “U.D.C.” A train of rhythmic thought I could follow. But from “U.D.C.” another arrow pointed to “Eurydice.” This one seemed random. Until I said it aloud. And then it made perfect sense: UDC sounds a lot like Ur-y-Di-Ce, the ingenue stuck in the Underworld. An official description confirms that the artist’s mind was occupied with the domains of the afterlife in her vision for the piece: “Instead of charging into battle, Walker’s headless horseman wanders in Civil War purgatory.”

Seeing the sculpture, I was again disturbed by Yeats’s poem of the apocalypse. I had begun to feel it not just in the divine second coming at the hand of Vindicatrix, or in the chorus of pietàs—mothers “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.” But also here. The grotesquerie is moving its slow thighs over the sands, like that rough beast at the end of the stanza, who lumbers to awaken our next dispensation.

When Richmond’s monuments were removed after 2020, the pieces were stored at an open-air municipal facility, which Cauleen Smith called “the boneyard.” It was on a tour of the lot that she saw Vindicatrix for the first time, shrink-wrapped on her side. “I couldn’t even see her,” Smith told me. “Then there’s all this beautiful cut stone that has really gorgeous graffiti all over it for yards.” Wildflowers grew among them. She said the relics had a sort of beauty.

When “Monuments” closes in May, the borrowed statues will return to their communities, which will determine their final fates. Smith likes the idea of something akin to the boneyard. “We’re still clearly adolescent as a nation, and the nation may not even survive adolescence. It seems to be on a self-destruct, white-supremacy party blitz right now,” she said—in other words, the promise of Vindicatrix might still be coming to pass.

But if America does survive, she continued, “It will mature into something that needs reminders of where we were.” If the day comes when the idea of white supremacy is a remnant of our past, she wants the ruins of these things to remain.

I mentioned to Simpson, the curator, the show’s somewhat numinous and supernatural motifs. He said it wasn’t surprising that it would feel haunted. “This is all about death,” he replied, listing the dead: soldiers, political institutions, slavery, the Confederacy, Black teenagers. “It’s never surprising when the religious or the metaphysical enters into the equation,” he said, “when you’re dealing with so much pain and loss.”

As I left the museum and returned to the warmth of a California afternoon, and then one red-eye later descended into a dawn blizzard over New York, I was still thinking about the show’s warnings, and its metaphysical imperatives. In times of trouble, I suppose our minds wander toward the transcendental. And I realized that just as Vindicatrix had appeared to Smith, a strange specter had recently come to me, too.

It was in August, and I was driving sunburned and alone down back roads in North Carolina after visiting Valor Memorial again, where two statues that had been in storage for years would soon be delivered. It had been so hot that my phone blanched and then blanked.

Along the road, the sweeping green fields seemed to rise up around me as I cut past clapboard homes and barns and silos. And coming around the curve I saw a black figure in the road. A dot that grew into a bird. And then another—two turkey vultures as tall as vacuum cleaners. They were pecking at a gray heap, but they took flight as the lump hurtled toward me and clarified. First, there was a vulva flanked by two deflated legs, and then an expanse of belly and a paw flung unnaturally over a red tear in the barrel chest where the vultures were eating. In my rearview, a tongue unraveled from the block head—a pit bull—whose wide smile carried a laugh of shock. I watched the vultures return to it through my mirror as the road took me around a bend.

I gripped the wheel when in the distant haze, another dark figure entered the story. The speck charged down the road on diminutive legs, and slowed to a gallop as he reached me. I braked, and this little black terrier and I watched each other from across the lane. He was heaving in the heat, and wore no collar, so there was no telling which house he belonged to.

Perhaps that was a sign that he didn’t belong to any house, I now realize, or to this world. Because the memory returns to me with the recognition that some folklores believe black dogs are supernatural apparitions—barghest, padfoot—and the omens of misfortune, or death. They appear to you before the end comes.

In the heat on the Southern road, this little omen was anxious. He panted and paced and whined, squinting from the glare off the asphalt, looking to me and then in the direction he was heading: down the road to the dead dog. He was pitiful. He was the omen of death come to warn his friend, but death had beat him there. He was late, and he knew it. And then he took off from the road and disappeared into the woods.

I suppose that’s how it goes sometimes, little dog. Sometimes we see the specter warning us of the second coming around the curve and we stand guard—become vigilant—lest we lose the world we’ve worked so hard to create. And then sometimes the specter comes too late. Sometimes our end is upon us before we know it.