Monuments Were Never Meant to Last Forever
Art historian Cat Dawson’s new book invites us to contemplate a world populated by subversive monuments — or one that does away with them altogether.
While Robert Musil’s century-old adage that “there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument” still rings true in some ways, many monuments today feel more visible than ever. Statues of Cecil Rhodes and Robert E. Lee have collapsed under the pressures of public protest, exposing monuments for what they really are: flashpoints where histories are negotiated and mythologies are formed.
In Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape (2025), art historian Cat Dawson identifies the roots of contemporary artists’ confrontation of monumentality by locating its watershed moment. Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety” (2014), a 75-foot (~22.9-meter) sugar sculpture, temporarily occupied one of the now-demolished buildings at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn and radically subverted the genre. Walker drew upon conventions of monumentality and subverted them to foreground histories of gendered and racialized violence, consumption, and extraction that bind the past to the present.
Dawson compellingly dubs this artistic turn a “monument boom” — an era characterized by contemporary artists troubling the genre of monuments from 2014 through at least 2023. This new generation of monuments pushes beyond the premise of uplifting silenced narratives, Dawson argues, by unraveling the very processes by which historical exclusions become naturalized in the public realm.
The core chapters focus on the varied approaches taken by Walker’s “Fons Americanus” (2019), Kehinde Wiley’s “Rumors of War” (2019), Mark Bradford’s Tomorrow Is Another Day at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and Lauren Halsey’s the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022), the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden Commission of 2023. Dawson argues that these artworks employ Black and queer representational strategies in their acts of monumental undoing, primarily concerning legacies of Atlantic slavery and their manifestations in the United States. This tight selection of examples illuminates the ordinary terror embodied by the “traditional” monument — typified by Confederate monuments from the late 19th and early 20th centuries — and how these artists subvert it, whether through wit, narrative mélange, or honoring everyday figures.
Rather than construct an imagined past as a universal tradition, as with conventional monuments, Dawson writes that these contemporary artists understand ambivalence and impermanence as key conditions of resistance, whether in the form of ephemeral materials, representations that flit across binaries, or speculative propositions for the future that challenge linear readings of history. Halsey’s the eastside of south central, for example, reimagines the Temple of Dendur as a site where ancient African pasts collapse into an Afrofuturist horizon, where hieroglyphics commingle with references to funk music, graffiti art, protest signs, and Los Angeles streetscapes.
This “ambivalence” is perhaps the keenest element of Dawson’s analysis. It taps into the fallibility of tidy historical narratives, while opening the window of uncertainty and anxiety that shapes all monuments.
Dawson recognizes “that all monuments are subject to constraints that delimit even the most nuanced and complex examples of the form.” Still, I found myself craving a greater critical acknowledgment of the institutional conditions from which these new monuments emerge. The public power of these artworks is necessarily mediated by cultural institutions, which are themselves replete with legacies of extraction and exclusion running parallel to the tenor of monumentalism.
Museums like The Met and the Tate, for instance, have latched onto the creative possibilities and popular interest afforded by the temporary, large-scale commission, which most of Dawson’s examples fall under. Yet artists must still play by the rules, abiding by the conditions of sponsorship to create an institutionally sanctioned expression of monumentalism. Despite Walker’s demonstrated interest in institutional contexts, her sculpture “Fons Americanus” at the Tate referred directly to a monument sited outside of the gallery, rather than the connections between its namesake, sugar refinery magnate Henry Tate, and the slave economy. Walker herself recalled that a former Tate director seemed unamused by her suggestion that “A Subtlety" would be thematically well-suited for the Turbine Hall.
What stakes are at play if the most common staging grounds for these new monuments are the rarified atriums and rooftops of art museums? While Dawson discusses the sponsorship and public presence of Confederate monuments in detail, this question of context is under-addressed in their study of new monuments — a narrative thread that would have helped generate a more complex picture of the networks of power that mediate the monumental landscape.
That said, the salience of Dawson’s argument to the rise of fascism today and the future of monuments is undeniable. In freeing the form from the strictures of convention, these artworks contemplate a world populated by more diverse monumental narratives — or one that does away with monuments altogether.
The ongoing negotiation of these paths forward plays out before us in real time. MONUMENTS at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, takes decommissioned Confederate memorials as the raw matter for artistic intervention, including works by Walker, who co-curated the show. The Trump administration’s call for a “National Garden of American Heroes” threatens to mobilize the aggrandizing rhetoric of monument-making in full force, ultimately in service of the president’s own self-monumentalization, while it seeks to reinstall many of the Confederate statues that were removed during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
As we scramble through this terrain of toppled, relocated, mutated monuments or ruminate on those never built, Dawson’s book is a timely reminder to question the fundamental utility of monuments — who are they for, and what work do they actually do?
Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape (2025) by Cat Dawson is published by the MIT Press and is available online and through independent booksellers.
