11/02/2025
"A new art show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick in Los Angeles features 11 decommissioned Confederate statues. It's a pointed reminder that U.S. history is constantly being made and remade, despite attempts to freeze it in place". The New York Times detailed in an editorial on recent past.
Featuring the clone of our Gloria Victis, Gloria, officially known as the Maryland Soldiers and Sailors Monument, it is shown in all of her beauty, still covered in graffiti from filthy vandals who demanded its removal along with the remainder of the Confederate Monuments in the City of Baltimore. It was dismantled from the University of Maryland campus in 2017.
Gloria, like Gloria Victis, otherwise known as Fame, was created by the same French sculptor Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl in Brussels, Belgium, and put on display first in his Académe Julian art school in Paris, France, before moving to the United States to a studio apartment in New York City, in 1892. There, both statues would later be purchased by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to be incorporated into becoming Monuments to the fallen and passing Veterans of the South.
Depicting the same man, Lieutenant Henry Howe Cook of the Tennessee Army of the Confederate States Military, the living legend that survived the war and became a recognized tribute to the struggles against tyrannical government inspired European theaters of involvement to not only capture the Patriotism of the American conflict, but to depict it in all forms of art. Today, those statues are mocked in ruin.
Knowing that a contemporary art museum holds a collection of Confederate Monuments that are beaten, defamed, deformed and disrespected behind a cover of revolutionary communist motives, it provides great appreciation to our local community here in our neck of the woods to still have Fame standing over our Confederate dead in a well maintained cemetery with over 200 Veterans of the War.
Sometimes, we cannot control what others do. What we can do, is do what we can control:
