Artists, historic preservationists and museum curators are watching the nation's Confederate soldier statues coming down and are torn about what should happen to them when they're no longer atop their pedestals.
"I am loath to erase history," Lonnie Burch III, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, told The New York Times. "For me it's less about whether they come down or not, and more about what the debate is stimulating."
And where Burch would like the statues to be grouped together and put on display, so people will understand what they stood for, others aren't so sure.
Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford, for example, told the Times that he does not believe the statutes should be removed unless educational plaques are put in their place, to explain why the statues are gone.
Robin Kirk, the co-director of Duke University's Human Rights Center, meanwhile, called for the statue removals to take place "slower and more deliberative."
They and other artists and curators, though, said they think the growing effort to remove statues creates bad implications for artists, and many of them said they feel that way even though they oppose President Donald Trump, who has defended the statues.
When Trump made statements that critics believed defended the white nationalists who called to preserve the monuments, some of his political opponents, such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, quickly promised to remove statues from public places, and without consulting art historians or curators first.
But to other artists, like Adam Pendleton, the Confederate statues should not be equated with works of art.
"They're instruments of a political agenda and it would be real folly to suggest that there is any kind of ambiguity," said Pendleton. "Their artistic merit is irrelevant because it's beside the point.
"We don't think about who created the statue of Robert E. Lee and what her intentions were. We think about who and what Robert E. Lee signifies."
Hollis Robbins, a humanities professor at Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Institute, though, said the statues were works of artists, and shouldn't be removed because the artists or their subjects could be considered offensive.
"While I am personally in favor of these sculptures' going away, I think it's important to understand that many of these artists did not have a political motivation," she said. "They had an aesthetic motivation."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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