Removed in 2017 from Wyman Park and other prominent public locations and stored behind a chain-link fence at a city impoundment lot, Baltimore’s four Confederate statues are back in the spotlight, on display at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.

After striking heroic poses here for decades, the pieces look especially surreal in the photos accompanying Sunday’s New York Times magazine article about the exhibition, which were shot while the show was being set up.

Take the 1948 Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee Monument.

Atop a granite plinth in Wyman Park, it depicted the Confederate generals astride their horses within view of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Johns Hopkins Homewood campus. Now it stands on the floor next to a pile of wooden pallets and dollies.

The Confederate Women’s Monument, erected in 1917 as the focal point of Bishop Square Park at Charles Street and University Parkway, shares space with plastic tool buckets and an orange construction cone.

The 1907 statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States during the Civil War, remains spattered with protesters’ paint. It was resting on its back before a tangled extension cord.

Monuments, which opened last month and runs through May 3, 2026, brings together 10 decommissioned monuments with newly commissioned and existing works by 19 contemporary artists to reflect on America’s history, as the show’s curators put it.

The Times piece provides this example of the juxtaposition:

Across the hall from the Confederate Women’s Monument, which shows a woman cradling a wounded or dying soldier, “are Jon Henry’s photographs of Black women holding the limp bodies of their sons, reflecting the mothers’ fears of police brutality.”

In contrast to the Trump administration, trying its best to stamp out the history of slavery at the Smithsonian and national parks, this show puts the racist ideology behind these bronze soldiers and weeping women front and center.

“The decommissioned works illustrate the evolution of the Confederate monument from its roots in a funerary impulse to its rise as a crystalline symbol of a white supremacist ideology, whose obstinacy became increasingly conspicuous against calls for civil rights,” say the show’s organizers.

Tributes to the “Lost Cause”

Along with the Jackson-Lee Monument and the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors and Confederate Women’s monuments, a fourth monument was taken down at the North Garden of Mount Vernon Place in 2017.

It depicted Roger B. Taney, a former chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Taney wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, could not be considered U.S. citizens. The ruling overturned an Act of Congress, advanced the cause of slavery and aggravated mounting tensions between the North and South that broke out into war four years later.

That war ended with the Union victory in 1865, but “Lost Cause” Confederate sympathizers continued to use monuments like Baltimore’s to honor those who fought for states’ rights and the defense of “the Southern way of life against Northern aggression.”

In 2015, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake formed a special commission to study what to do about the monuments shortly after nine people were shot at a Black church in Charleston, S.C. Photos of the white-supremacist gunman, Dylann Roof, posing with the Confederate flag ignited a nationwide debate over public references to the Confederacy.

By summer 2017, pressure was growing on Mayor Catherine Pugh to remove the monuments in the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. that erupted into violence and led to the death of a counter-protester, who was mowed down by a car driven by a self-described white nationalist.

Images of white men carrying flaming torches and waving swastikas while shouting racist and antisemitic chants sparked protests around the country.

“It’s unbelievable to me that we have to march against Nazis,” 90-year-old protester Sally Freedman told The Brew at Baltimore’s protest, which began at the Lee-Jackson monument in Wyman Park Dell. “I thought we had a war to get rid of them.”

• Over 1,000 march against white nationalism and Baltimore’s Confederate statues (8/14/17)

Amid a citywide debate over whether to formally “de-accession” the monuments, which stood on city-owned land, or leave them up with contextualizing signage, local leaders took sides.

“We need to destroy them,” then-2nd District Councilman Brandon Scott said.

The 11th District’s Eric Costello, meanwhile, declared himself “opposed to going down the path of destroying anything that’s artwork or human knowledge” and called for the monuments to be “buried in a very dark closet.”

The City Council passed a non-binding resolution vaguely calling for the city to “de-construct” the statues.

Blowing past both the council and the recommendation of the special commission, Pugh took decisive action on the night of August 16, 2017, sending in public works crews to remove the statues from their graffiti-tagged bases.

The pieces were carted off to a Transportation Department impound and storage lot in an industrial area off Pulaski Highway.

Trump Decree: Restore Them

The monuments’ subsequent path to the Los Angeles exhibition wasn’t smooth either. Initially agreeing to loan the stored pieces to the California museum, Mayor Brandon Scott decided not to in 2021, only to later relent.

As for what happens next year after the show is over and the Confederate relics are returned to Baltimore, that remains unclear.

The city will still own them. The Maryland Historical Trust has an easement on three of the monuments and has said it does not want them destroyed.

But it’s hard to imagine Baltimore’s monuments will get the kind of resurrection President Trump ordered in August for the statue of Confederate General Albert Pike, which stood near the Capitol grounds in Washington.

“Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in parks or other locations that imply honor”  – Eleanor Holmes Norton.

A leader of the Freemasons who worked closely with Native Americans from slave-owning tribes, Pike was suspected by some historians to have been a post-war leader of the Klu Klux Klan. His statue was toppled and set on fire by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.

Late last month, using funds Trump officials found during the government shutdown, the Pike statue was reinstalled to its place near Judiciary Square.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s non-voting elected member in Congress, denounced the restoration as “a morally objectionable move.”

“Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in parks or other locations that imply honor,” she stated in a press release, further noting that “Pike himself served dishonorably. He took up arms against the United States, misappropriated funds, and was ultimately captured and imprisoned by his own troops.”