When a monument to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson was decommissioned in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021, curator Hamza Walker managed to get ahold of it and transported it to a warehouse in New Jersey.

The hefty monument’s move was no small feat, legally or logistically. But once it arrived, he offered it to the artist Kara Walker (no relation), inviting her to do with it as she pleased at a foundry in upstate New York.

Walker has been deftly probing the dark sides of American history since the 1990s, transforming its iconography until it reveals the violence too often lurking underneath.

She approached the Jackson monument similarly, recombining its parts to form Unmanned Drone (2023), a 12-foot statue melding the general with his horse, named Little Sorrel.…