I’ll let Horace D. Ballard’s positively vibrating review of MONUMENTS and his description of filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s installation, The Warden (2025) speak for itself. Just google him and Vindicatrix.
Vindicatrix, which slipped right by me when I read Carolina Miranda’s earlier piece in the NY Review of Books, maybe because my brain was overloaded by her take on Kara Walker’s “aberrant chimera” of a de-reconstructed Stonewall Jackson sculpture at The Brick. Miranda’s description of the Lost Cause, though, it sticks with me as I think about Smith, and about Vindicatrix: “Walker’s surgical reimagination of the Jackson statue instead dismantles the pleasing aesthetics of white supremacy to reveal the ugliness within: the disfiguring myth of the Lost Cause, which has papered over the racist cornerstones of the Confederacy with romanticized stories about sacrifice and bravery.”
I can’t find a video of her whole conversation, but the student paper at Occidental gives an account of Smith’s explanation of The Warden, made with and around Vindicatrix, a decommissioned idealized female allegorical statue from Richmond symbolizing confederate vengeance: “I really had problems with the way her beauty was always discussed in the description of the statue…and I thought that we should be denied some kind of access to her, or that she should be denied the power to project that beauty.”
From both Miranda and Ballard’s accounts, I think The Warden succeeds most fully as an in-person experience—I haven’t seen the show irl. But it’s Smith’s attunement to the weaponization of beauty and how it resonates with the disfiguring myth that haunts me right now.
I saw Vindicatrix in the summer of 2020 and didn’t pay it much mind; it sat high atop a column as part of a larger monument to Jefferson Davis, built in 1907 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy as part of a segregated real estate development, city beautification, and Lost Cause public propaganda project. It’s that placid ignorability that’s the problem, the ugliness behind the gentility of the UDC, and the deceptive timidity of the colloquial name for the figure, “Miss Confederacy.” It sat upon a base ringed with the motto of the confederacy, Deo Vindice. The purported dispute over even the translation of the Latin—”God will avenge” or just “with God our defender”?—feels designed to parry criticism, an early version of the “heritage, not hate” excuse that underpins the entire Lost Cause headfake. What ever could be the meaning of the motto and a statue erected by white supremacists in a multiracial community—a third of Virginia was Black in 1910—vowing vengeance for the defeat forty years earlier of their treasonous ancestors, and for the imagined privations and indignities they had to endure since then by recognizing Black Americans as human beings equal before the law?
The discovery of Miss Confederacy’s secret identity led me to an article published in Richmond Magazine in September 2017, six weeks after white supremacists murdered a counterprotestor at a rally in Charlottesville, which had been organized to thwart an effort to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. That was the moment Richmond’s go-to source for dentist and restaurant recs felt the need to explain one of the city’s less well known problematic confederate statues thus: “The Story of Vindicatrix: An allegorical symbol of the Confederacy, this statue is also somebody’s grandmother.”
The carved inscription running around the pediment of the colonnade quotes from [Jefferson Davis’s final Senate] speech, in which he insists that the breakaway came not to commit “hostility to others … but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children.”
Those rights included owning slaves.
[Sculptor Edward] Valentine worked on his commission for several years prior to the 1907 installation. According to a 1954 Richmond Times-Dispatch article by Lois H. Keane, he first hired a professional New York model to pose. “Apparently she didn’t meet the requirements,” Keane wrote. “A young Richmond girl superseded her and assumed the illustrious role with marked success.”
The article refers to a note by Valentine about the change of model on April 24, 1906: “Miss Mary Patteson of ‘Forest Hill,’ stood for me for the face of the full-size female figure.” Patteson’s ancestors built the Patteson-Schutte House, Richmond’s oldest frame residence, in the 1750s; the Historic Richmond Foundation saved it from demolition in 2006.
The extensive context; the local angles and characters; the historic house preservation; the full quotes from Davis’s secession speech, and from the article pressing Vindicatrix back into service against the Civil Rights Movement; and the single mention of slavery, not as something suffered, but as an inheritable, conveyable property right. This is how declarations of white vengeance cloaked in classical and historical aesthetics reverberated after 110 years:
As vintage meet-cutes between the prettiest scions of the families with their names on buildings, posing for the neighborhood confederate vengeance monument; and, to address the Current Conflict Over Monuments, a quote from a local music producer, who happens to be a namesake descendant of the Vindicatrix model: “He understands why some people are offended by what the statues represent. ‘I furtively hope the spire with our ‘grandmother’ on top will be preserved,’ he wrote, ‘but they can discard the statue of Jeff Davis as they may wish.’”
This is what it still looked and sounded like in 2017, the disfiguring myth still being stretched and tugged at to hide the ugliness and vengeance behind neighborliness and civility while tiki torch inventories were depleting faster than anyone at Home Depot expected.