Re:  Confederate Monuments and the Power of Absence.

Some good ideas here about what to do with Confederate statues that seem to dot the landscape, especially in the South.  Sarah Beetham, assistant professor of art history at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in particular makes a powerful suggestion:  Remove the statue but leave the pedestal.  “I actually find the idea of these empty pedestals being there to be really exciting, because they are charged spaces, because that removal is going to create something that people have to think about,” she says, “What does an empty pedestal mean? What are the possibilities for art on an empty pedestal?”

I think this is a powerful idea.  Even better, for many of the Robert E. Lee statues for example, would be to remove the rider from the horse and leave the statue of the riderless horse.  It leaves an impression of an instrument of power and movement being leaderless, which has been a problem in Southern States for decades.