BALTIMORE — Tucked into the corner of a Baltimore City impound lot teeming with discarded lampposts and street signs, four Confederate-linked monuments have sat for five years.
City officials and historians debated what to do with the bronze statues erected to honor Confederate figures after they were removed in the middle of the night Aug. 17, 2017, and hauled to the lot where they have been hidden ever since. No clear home emerged until a Los Angeles visual art space called LAXART asked to borrow them for a new exhibit.
The large-scale exhibit, called Monuments, will open in the fall of 2023 and places contemporary art created by renowned Black artists alongside decommissioned Confederate statues removed from American cities after the 2015 killing of churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist and the deadly neo-Nazi rally Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
