Artists on Artworks: Nikita Gale on

Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone

Sunday, April 19, 12 pm
The Brick
518 N. Western Avenue
Free

Historian Karen Cox traces the ways in which Hollywood helped keep the myth of the Lost Cause alive in film and on television, contributing to Americans' nostalgia for the South and the Confederacy, while erasing slavery as a cause of the Civil War and minimizing racial inequality and unrest.

Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the author of four books and the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history. Her first book, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, won the Julia Cherry Spruill prize for best book in southern women’s history and in 2021 was listed in the Wall Street Journal as one of the top five books on the Lost Cause. Her most recent book, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice was published in 2021, and has just been released as a 2nd edition with a new intro that covers the story since 2021. 

Karen has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, and Smithsonian Magazine. She’s given dozens of media interviews in the U.S. and around the world. A Vox video based on Dixie’s Daughters and her Ted-Ed lesson on the Lost Cause has a combined 7 million views. She appeared in Henry Louis Gates’s PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, Lucy Worsley’s American History’s Biggest Fibs for the BBC, and the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground, which examines the underlying history of Confederate monuments through the lens of monument removal in New Orleans. She is currently working on a book that examines how non-southerners have embraced and used the Lost Cause since the end of Reconstruction.

This program is presented in conjunction with MONUMENTS, an exhibition co-organized and co-presented by The Brick and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA).