Le’Andra LeSeur’s Monument Eternal, now at Pioneer Works, is many things at once. It is a confrontation, an unraveling, a kind of alchemy. Marking the artist’s debut institutional solo exhibition, the show draws on LeSeur’s childhood memories of visiting Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park, where innocent joys of family picnics and fireworks mingled with the mountain’s weightier, sinister history.
Stone Mountain is not just any mountain — it’s an embodiment of White supremacy and colonization, a bitter legacy of stolen and desecrated Indigenous land. The resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan can be marked to Thanksgiving night of 1915, when it assembled on the summit; the group would continue to use the site for rituals and celebration. Carved into the mountain’s north side is the largest bas-relief carving in the world, a tribute to a lost cause, depicting three Confederate leaders (Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson) in monstrous glory. The carving, completed a mere 50 years ago, is a provocation, immortalizing on a massive, unabashed scale figures whose entire legacy lies in the subjugation of others.
For LeSeur, Stone Mountain is as much a monument to White supremacy as it is a testament to the violence visited on the bodies and minds of Black people who come into contact with it. Monument Eternal — from a haunting video installation to tactile works that pulse with the artist’s breath — considers the burden of that violence and the felt tension of moving through and being marked by spaces that uphold racist legacies.
The effect of this tension is felt most powerfully in the exhibition’s titular film, a seven-minute video installation that both anchors and disorients the viewer. The video begins with the image of LeSeur’s body — solid yet fragile — falling in slow motion atop Stone Mountain’s granite peak. In voiceover, LeSeur recites a poem against a rhythmic drumbeat — a heartbeat, perhaps — asking, “Why must I collapse? Why must I fall?”
As her body collapses over and over, a new form of poetry emerges: not the fearful refrain of “why?” but the poignancy of accepting the inevitable. The past has its own gravity; it is always pressing on us. And yet, at some points, she looks as though she is not falling but simply floating against the backdrop of a bright blue sky. Monument Eternal is not just about falling; it’s about how to fall gracefully, how to survive a fall, and what it means to fall again and again and still find a way to rise. Each fall suggests a different story — a Black body in movement, in flux, is always more than an object to be crushed beneath the gravity of White supremacy. It is, as LeSeur says in the video’s narration, “A soft place to land.”
Other works in the show present visual echoes of this central theme. “A faint touch of bones remembering” (2023), a painting LeSeur created during her residency at Pioneer Works, is an impression of her experiences at Stone Mountain. The canvas is layered with jagged lines clashing with soft washes of watercolor, deep earth tones interrupted by sudden flashes of bright, unnatural blues, each brushstroke a translation of how her body reacted during visits to the mountain: a nervous flick of the wrist, a sudden intake of breath. The painting is therefore a kind of map, a record of the body’s movements, each memory of communion with the land embedded within it.
In “Sustaining Bloom (After Porteri)” (2024), LeSeur draws on the resilience of the yellow daisies that grow improbably on Stone Mountain’s barren surface. Here, the artist once again translates the act of survival in inhospitable environments into movement, this time using charcoal and hibiscus to create a portrait of fragility and persistence. LeSeur, importantly, is not romanticizing this survival. Instead, she shows us what it costs — the marks of struggle, the violence of existing in a place that does not want you to live. The exhibition culminates with a pair of mouth-blown stained glass panels, “A soft place to land…” (2024), set opposite the video installation. Casting a soft glow throughout the gallery, it recalls the sanctuary of a church, transforming the space into one of almost holy contemplation.
It is no accident that this show draws its name from Alice Coltrane’s forthcoming autobiography. The late musician and spiritual leader wrote of seeking transcendence, of pushing her body and spirit to new dimensions, believing that only in extremes could she find peace. LeSeur’s work is a kind of parallel journey: a ritual of the body, a movement through pain that also gestures beyond it.
LeSeur’s work is as much about the land as it is about the self. To carve into a mountain is to scar the earth. To navigate a racist monument as a queer Black woman is to carry the weight of that scar. Monument Eternal asks: What do we do with these wounds? How do we carry them? And what, if anything, can grow from the places that have been marred? Through visceral, corporeal gestures, LeSeur doesn’t just document trauma — she reconfigures it into a psychic site from which one can still bloom into something tender, something fierce, something eternal.
Le’Andra LeSeur: Monument Eternal continues at Pioneer Works (159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn) through December 15. The exhibition was organized by Vivian Chui.
