Chris Zurawsky: Our Stephen Foster may be headed for LA

While the battle continues around the potential removal of the Christopher Columbus statue in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park, another controversial piece of historic local public art currently under wraps is set to return to public view … 2,500 miles away.

In September, the Pittsburgh Arts Commission unanimously approved loaning a statue of composer Stephen Foster — known as the “father of American music” — for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in fall 2023.

In 2017, the commission voted to remove the 120-year-old statue from a small plaza outside the Carnegie Museums in Oakland, following public outcry over its insensitive depiction of a Black man sitting at Foster’s feet. The statue was hauled away in mid-2018 and has been in storage since, despite the commission’s pledge to find a new location for it within a year of its removal.

In a letter to the commission supporting the loan, the city’s planning director, Andrew Dash, wrote: “The City of Pittsburgh agreed to store the monument in a City facility until an appropriate location — including proper contextualization and interpretation — could be identified.”

Little did Pittsburghers expect that the “appropriate location” would be in California, at least temporarily, and not in Foster’s birthplace. The L.A. museum’s website shows current exhibitions running for about eight months. At that rate, the Foster statue won’t be back in Pittsburgh until fall 2024 — seven years after the commission’s vote to remove it — with a new local site still to be identified.

In Los Angeles, Foster will have some strange bedfellows. The exhibition focuses on a group of recently decommissioned Confederate monuments from throughout the United States, displayed alongside works of contemporary art, with the goal of generating discussion around race, gender and American history.

Stephen Foster was not a Confederate, however, as the loan request admits. In fact, he worked with abolitionists and helped to elevate Black culture in his day, according to research published by University of Pittsburgh professor and American folk music expert Deane L. Root.

As a condition of the statue’s loan, the Pittsburgh Art Commission said it would draft a brief document putting Foster and his work in proper context and would ask the museum to include the commission’s text in a program or publication accompanying the exhibit.

That’s a good step toward protecting Foster’s reputation and enlightening art aficionados and museum- goers in Los Angeles, but what about those of us who were most directly affected by the contentious debate around the statue and its removal?

As the exhibit’s co-curator, Hamza Walker, wrote in a letter to Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto: “We are hoping to broaden and deepen the discourse from all sides and for all sides as the issue is anything but Black and white.”

Unfortunately, local leaders are missing a golden opportunity to “broaden and deepen the discourse” about racial issues here at home, by failing to find a new location for the Foster statue in Pittsburgh.

Chris Zurawsky lives in Squirrel Hill and enjoys playing Stephen Foster songs on the piano.