MONUMENTS: Hamza Walker in Conversation with Mechtild Widrich

Join us for a special conversation with the curator of MONUMENTS, presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Brick.

MONUMENTS: Hamza Walker in conversation with Mechtild Widrich

Hamza Walker is the current director of The Brick (formerly LAXART) and recipient of the 2026 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Among the recent exhibitions he has organized is MONUMENTS, currently on view at two venues in Los Angeles, and Elizabeth Paige Smith: Unshade Me of You and Gregg Bordowitz: This Is Not A Love Song both at The Brick. With an impressive career that includes his more than 20-year tenure as associate curator and director of education at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society, Walker's approach to contemporary art and curatorial practice promises a rich and insightful dialogue.

Mechtild Widrich, Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at SAIC, will lead this engaging conversation. Her interdisciplinary expertise spans contemporary art, architecture, public space, and aesthetic theory, and her most recent book, Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art was a finalist for the 2024 ASAP Book Prize.

The exhibition MONUMENTS, presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Brick, finds decommissioned confederate monuments—many formerly displayed in public spaces across the United States—revised, reassembled, and adjusted by leading artists and by the public. By placing these contested and reframed objects in a museum adjacent to other contemporary works of art, the exhibition invites reflection on how historical monuments have furthered dangerous ideologies in the public imagination and how art may rectify this situation by providing alternative images of public memory.

Join us for a special conversation with the exhibition’s curator, who will share insights into the project’s origins, the process of bringing these monuments into a museum setting, the artists involved, and questions the exhibition raises about commemoration, history, and public consciousness.