Carolina A. Miranda

Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s The Balcony (2020–2021) at ‘Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow,’ New Orleans

Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow an exhibition in various locations in New Orleans, October 23, 2021–January 23, 2022. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi. Rizzoli Electa, 271 pp., $60.00

On the afternoon in 1884 that New Orleans erected its principal monument to Robert E. Lee, the heavens let loose a deluge. It was February 22—George Washington’s birthday—and thousands had gathered at a circle on the edge of downtown. A band played the “Grand March” from Rienzi, an early opera by Richard Wagner about a valiant battle hopelessly lost. Milling among the various New Orleans civic leaders was Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the former Confederate general (from neighboring St. Bernard Parish) who kicked off the Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, helped popularize the use of the Confederate battle flag, and, following his defeat, did his part to buttress the cult of the lost cause. Also in attendance were two of Lee’s daughters, Mary and Mildred; Lee had died of a stroke fourteen years before.

The torrent sent the crowd running but didn’t dampen the spirits of the event’s organizers. According to an account published in The Times-Democrat the following day, they simply repaired to a nearby artillery hall. The paper printed in full the planned speech by Charles E. Fenner, a local judge who served as the president of the R.E. Lee Monumental Association, the organization that saw the monument to completion. The speech was spectacularly obsequious, hailing Lee as endowed with “exceptional gifts of physical beauty” and as a “chivalric chieftain of the lost cause.”

Like the oratory, the monument to Lee was hyperbolic—in this case, in scale. It was composed of a towering sixteen-foot bronze atop a sixty-foot Doric column of Tennessee marble on a base of Georgia granite—all of which emerged from an earthen berm at the heart of a well-trafficked roundabout. It showed the general in his Confederate service uniform, arms crossed, as though “overlooking the field of battle,” according to a newspaper report of the era. The statue, one of the earliest and most prominent of the Jim Crow–era Confederate monuments, stood in this place for 133 years.

In 2015, after the mass murder of nine Black parishioners by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina, and much public debate about the purpose of Confederate monuments, the New Orleans City Council voted six to one to remove four monuments, including the one to Lee and a statue of Beauregard that stood at the entrance to City Park. Lee didn’t actually come down for another year and a half—after protests, lawsuits, threats of violence, and actual violence. (The contractor who had been hired to remove the monuments woke up one morning to find that his sports car had been incinerated.) On May 19, 2017, the general’s bronze likeness was finally plucked off by a crane, then carted to a warehouse. “The Civil...