"Stumped (About Monuments)" is a large-scale charcoal and graphite work on paper from Kara Walker's Fons Americanus archive. The drawing shows a naked Black woman, perched atop a raised, columnar stump of indeterminate material. Though seated, she is not quite steady, arms braced behind her body and feet carefully balanced on against the side of the opaque, craggy pillar. The landscape behind her is blank, save for a swirl of charcoal shadow around her body. There is no stability or comfort in her position, no grandiose ideal to be drawn from her elevated placement or the amorphous plinth that holds her.

In the context of her Fons Americanus fountain, Walker's work on paper further considers the function and reception—aesthetically and symbolically—of monuments within society. Memorials and statues have been critical motifs within the larger imperialist projects of Europe and North America, mythologizing narratives of oppression into venerated moments in Western history. In "Stumped (About Monuments)," the material presence of the monument is stripped down divorced from iconographic significance; subject to the ambivalent appraisal of the person seated upon it, Walker's drawing questions the power systems that determine who stands to be memorialized in the first place, and to what ideological ends.