Retiring Stephen Foster

I just heard that Pittsburgh removed its racist Stephen Foster statue at the end of April 2018. I've written before about the statue, which I saw last summer. The decision was made by the Pittsburgh Art Commission back in October.

The Commission decided the statue should be "hosted in a pri­vate, 'prop­erly con­tex­tu­alized' lo­ca­tion," but no one has figured out yet where that is. "The city [has] reached out to more than a dozen or­ga­ni­za­tions to find the Foster statue a new home. So far, none was able or in­ter­ested enough to take it," so it's going into ignominious storage, and maybe it will stay there.

The statue has had more than a century in the sun. Now it's time for it to sit in a closet for a while.


Photo by Andrew Rush, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette