Art dealer returns Hopi sacred artifacts

In our recent issue of Museum Anthropology journal, a number of people commented on the April 2013 auction of Zuni and Hopi items in Paris.  Below is a new development regarding one of the art dealers who purchased items at that sale.

Arizona Daily Sun, October 06, 2013, By Larry Hendricks
 
New York art dealer Monroe Warshaw was in Paris in April in search of drawings on paper. He regularly visits London, or Paris, in search of art.

While there, he attended an auction and purchased two ceremonial artifacts of the Hopi Tribe. After doing so, he was immediately vilified in the press. He had no idea of the controversy he stumbled into.

“I spoke with my normal lack of tact,” he said during an August visit to Flagstaff, remembering the interviews by the press after the auction.

From far and wide, he was accused of having no morals, of exploiting the Hopi culture. He insists his intentions were honorable.

Regardless, Warshaw made good on a promise he made in August to the Hopi Tribe. On Monday, the two sacred objects he purchased for nearly $40,000 at the auction were repatriated without cost to the tribe.

“Just happy I did the right thing,” Warshaw said via email this week...


More here.

British Museum has best spring ever

The British Museum has had its most successful spring on record, due in large part to the blockbuster Pompeii and Herculaneum show, which is on course to be its third most popular exhibition since it opened its doors in 1753.

More here.

Egypt: Art at Villa Borghese's Egyptian Museum back in Cairo

ROME - Anyone calling the museum inside the Egyptian Academy in Rome to learn about its opening hours will receive the same answer: 'We are sorry, the Egyptian museum has closed'. Employees also explained that 'the artifacts have gone back. It was a temporary exhibit'. The museum's artwork has been packed and taken back to Egypt, though it is still unclear where, in a without any clamour. This means that, for now, 200 original pieces of art mostly coming from the Egyptian museum in Tahrir square in the capital, are gone. They were brought to the Italian capital by ex-culture Minister Farouk Hosni after the renovation of the historic Egyptian cultural institution founded in 1929.

Back in 2010, the first Egyptian Museum in the capital was inaugurated with a lot of publicity by then-premier Silvio Berlusconi and former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

It is difficult to know why the unique art from the Pharaonic, Greek-Roman, Coptic and Islamic eras of which Rome was so proud has been shipped off to Egypt. According to Egyptian media, the decision was taken directly by the culture ministry with the objective of helping save Egypt's debt-ridden public finances. The new minister Alaa Abdel Aziz, according to the local Mena news agency, ordered the artifacts back in his efforts to raise money. Abdel Aziz was quoted as saying that since its inauguration 'the ministry has paid for all maintenance costs of the museum without benefiting from ticket sale revenues'. Access to the museum, however, has always been free not only to students and scholars but to all visitors. The Academy's director, Gihane Zaki, said that 'the exhibit of findings was temporary. Ever since its inception, the project provided for the art on show in Rome to return to Egypt after three years'.

More here.

Science Museum Group outlines "real threat" to three science museums in the north of England

The Director of the Science Museum Group, the London-based body responsible for Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry, the National Railway Museum in York and Bradford’s National Media Museum, has confirmed that closing one of the three northern sites is a "real threat" ahead of another painful round of government spending cuts.

An initial budget reduction of 25% was imposed after the Coalition government’s election in 2010. But the next spending review, which will be announced at the end of the month, is expected to tighten funding by a further 10%.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One programme, Ian Blatchford said leaders were contemplating closing the doors to one of the venues “with a very heavy heart”.
 
More here.

Mediterranean museum designed to give makeover to crime-hit Marseille

A new flagship museum dedicated to Mediterranean civilization in Marseille is hoping to shake off the southern metropolis’ reputation as France’s deadliest city with a drastic cultural makeover.

The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, which is being inaugurated by French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday, is the centerpiece of Marseille’s turn as the European Capital of Culture for 2013, which aims to attract 10 million visitors to the city this year.

More here.

Auction of Hopi Masks Proceeds After Judge’s Ruling

The Hopi artifacts auction makes the New York Times.

A contested auction of sacred Hopi Indian artifacts went forward on Friday in Paris and generated more than $1 million in sales, despite the presence of protesters inside and outside the auction house who urged patrons not to take part.

One featured item, a headdress known as the Crow Mother, drew intense interest. Bidding on this 1880s artifact, which had a high estimate of $80,000, soared to $210,000, drawing applause from a crowd of some 200 people in the sales room and protest from a woman who stood up and shouted: “Don’t purchase that. It is a sacred being.”

Click here to read the entire article.

The National Museum of the American Indian also recently posted a blog article related to the auction on "Respecting Non-Western Sacred Objects."

"Jew in the Box" Berlin Exhibit Causes a Stir

An ongoing exhibit in Germany reminds us of James Luna's "Artifact Piece" from 1987.

Nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, there is no more sensitive an issue in German life as the role of Jews. With fewer than 200,000 Jews among Germany's 82 million people, few Germans born after World War II know any Jews or much about them.

To help educate postwar generations, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum features a Jewish man or woman seated inside a glass box for two hours a day through August to answer visitors' questions about Jews and Jewish life. The base of the box asks: "Are there still Jews in Germany?"

Read the entire article here.

Vandalism as Art?

A Russian man who claims responsibility for defacing a painting by Mark Rothko at the Tate Modern has told the BBC: "I'm not a vandal."

The painting, Black on Maroon, one of Rothko's Seagram murals, was written on with black paint on Sunday.

Vladimir Umanets, founder of a movement he calls Yellowism, claims to be responsible but denies criminal damage.

Read more here from the BBC.

Turkey's Efforts to Repatriate Art Alarm Museums

An aggressive campaign by Turkey to reclaim antiquities it says were looted has led in recent months to the return of an ancient sphinx and many golden treasures from the region’s rich past. But it has also drawn condemnation from some of the world’s largest museums, which call the campaign cultural blackmail.

In their latest salvo, Turkish officials this summer filed a criminal complaint in the Turkish court system seeking an investigation into what they say was the illegal excavation of 18 objects that are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Norbert Schimmel collection.

Last year, Turkish officials recalled, Turkey’s director-general of cultural heritage and museums, Murat Suslu, presented Met officials with a stunning ultimatum: prove the provenance of ancient figurines and golden bowls in the collection, or Turkey could halt lending treasures. Turkey says that threat has now gone into effect.

Read the entire article from the New York Times here.

Louvre's Islamic Art Wing Opens At A Tense Time

In its boldest development in a generation, the Louvre Museum has a new wing dedicated to Islamic art, a nearly (EURO)100 million ($130 million) project that comes at a tense time between the West and the Muslim world.

Louvre curators tout their new Islamic Art department, which took 11 years to build and opens to the public on Saturday, as a way to help bridge cultural divides. They say it offers a highbrow and respectful counterpart to the recent unflattering depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in Western media that have sparked protests by many Muslims.

Still, one of the Louvre's own consultants acknowledged that some Muslims could be "shocked" by three images of Muhammad with his face exposed in the new wing. Many Muslims believe the prophet should not be depicted at all – even in a flattering way – because it might encourage idolatry.

Read more of the Huffington Post article or watch the BBC news report.

Museum’s £2m Shopping List

An update on renovations at the iconic Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology:

More than £2 million could be spent on improvements to a landmark museum in Cambridge, including a stylish new entrance.

Cambridge University’s Grade II-listed Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is working on plans for a new entrance in Downing Street in a “restrained classical language”, in keeping with the Edwardian building. [Read more here]

Italy, Looting & Curators

The latest developments in the Italy-Curator-Looting saga, here and here.

Who Demands the Cutty Sark?

You have heard of the Elgin Marbles and Zuni War Gods, but what say you of the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, the Cutty Sark, and the Lübeck Letter? Who knew that that Mary Queen of Scots, in her quiet repose, might be the center of heated repatriation demands. Well, anyone following Scottish heritage politics would know. Check out this fascinating list of the Top 10 Scottish Artifacts Abroad.

Zubun

"Zubun" opened in the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade on September 21st. With this exhibition the museum celebrates 108 years of its foundation. The exhibition consists of about 600 objects from museum’s collection, folk costumes from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia.

For us, a new word for the day: "zubun," according to the website, "a top garment vest, usually sleeveless, made of cloth, mostly in white color. People wore it during the whole year, and it was really a necessary piece of clothes of cattle-breeders. Zubun was widely spread on Balkan Peninsula, and it was worn in combination with shirt, bodice and doublet. From region to region it has different length."

Regarding Human Remains

A fascinating history-cum-dialogue about the shifting norms of collecting and displaying human remains in England and Australia.

Participants include: Dr. Lisa O'Sullivan (Senior Curator of Medicine, The Science Museum), Dr. Tiffany Jenkins (British sociologist working on a book called Contesting Human Remains; Museums and the Crisis of Authority), Simon Chaplin (Director of Museums & Special Collections, Royal College of Surgeons of England), and Lissant Bolton (Section Head, Oceania Oceanic collections, British Museum)

Collections Research and the Web: Reflections on a Successful [Half-] Day's Work at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Editor's Note: I am pleased to share a guest weblog post by Alison Petch, who is both Museum Registrar and Researcher on the ESRC-funded project "The Other Within: The Anthropology of Englishness" at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. As noted here previously, Alison recently authored a paper on the role of Notes and Queries in the history of museum anthropology that appeared in the most recent issue of Museum Anthropology. Thanks to Alison for this reflection, which I found to be an encouraging dispatch from the front lines of collections research.

Collections Research and the Web: Reflections on a Successful [Half-] Day's Work at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Alison Petch

On Tuesday 1 May 2007 I resumed work on a research database that I am compiling (which will ultimately be available online at the "The Other Within" website, here).

There are approximately 350 named companies and manufacturers associated with English objects in our collections. On that day I was trying to find out if there was any information on the web about a gunmaker from Oxford called Nicholes. The Museum previously only knew his surname, no other information, this information having come from the accession book entry:
Accession Book Entry - F. C. WOODFORDE, Esq. Market Drayton, Salop. May [1911]. - Pair of flint-lock pistols by Nicholes of Oxford, with steel wrench for turning the barrels. [1911.15.1]

A search for Nicholes in Google led me to one of my favourite sites: http://www.headington.org.uk/, which is expertly compiled by Stephanie Jenkins in her spare time and contains much valuable information. In this case, John Nicholes (and his father of the same name), as well as being gunsmiths, were both mayors of Oxford (see here for the site that I actually located the information on).

So I had discovered that the firearms were much older than we had thought. Then I noticed on the same site that there is a reference to the famous Parson Woodforde visiting the site and mentioning it in his diary: Parson Woodforde visited Nicholes’s gunshop when an undergraduate in Oxford, and wrote on 29 June 1763: “For a Pocket Pistol, alias a Dram Bottle, to carry in one’s Pocket, it being necessary on a Journey or so—at Nicholl’s, 0. 1. 0.”

So I googled James Woodforde and found both the wikipedia entry, which says when he was at Oxford and also the Parson Woodforde Society. Both of these sites contained much useful information.

I had already noted that the donor was called F.C. Woodforde, and had previously thought it likely that his full name was Francis Cardew Woodforde, so I got the Chairman of the Society's address and emailed him. Martin Brayne is an expert on James Woodforde and the Woodforde family, and he was kind enough to email by return and provide even more information about Francis Cardew Woodforde and the Woodforde connections. Within 2 hours I had found out it was more than likely that our firearms were owned by James Woodforde, passed to FCW and thence to us.

And all this before lunch! This kind of research would have previously taken much time to complete, would have relied upon my following up the Woodforde name similarity, reading all of the journals on the off-chance of a Woodforde connection to Nicholes being mentioned and then being able to tie in Francis Cardew to his ancestor.

The joy that webpages compiled by experts bring to researchers is not often acknowledged. I happened to be in correspondence with Jason, Museum Anthropology's editor and told him how much I had appreciated the way the web had facilitated my research, and enabled me to contact and gain knowleddge from so many experts and he encouraged me to write this piece for the Museum Anthropology blog. The more we use the web and, particularly, the more we add information to the web, the better the information will be and the more we will all gain - imagine what such investigations might be like in 100 years time.

This blog post is dedicated to Stephanie Jenkins and Martin Brayne without whose work and help I would not have had such a successful outcome.

New World Exhibition at the British Museum

A New World: England’s first view of America
(March 15 – June 17, 2007)

This exhibition focuses on more than 70 watercolours made by John White on the voyages to Virginia (now North Carolina) in the 1580s. These images are the earliest visual record by an Englishman of the flora, fauna and people of America and provide us with an idea of how fascinating this strange New World must have been to Europeans of the late 16th century.

The exhibition also features a selection of Elizabethan portraits, maritime and scientific instruments from the period, alongside historic maps, books, prints and other exquisite objects which relate to Elizabethan navigation and capture the excitement of this golden age of exploration.

For more information, visit the exhibition announcement on the British Museum website.

[Image taken from the exhibition catalog cover; text taken from the online exhibition announcement.]

Notes and Queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum

The second a paper in the new issue of Museum Anthropology [30(1)]--just published in AnthroSource--is titled "Notes and Queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum" and it is by Alison Petch, a researcher and the museum registrar at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. The abstract for Dr. Petch's paper is as follows:

This article examines the contribution that a major ethnographic museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, has made to the development of anthropology in the United Kingdom, through the prism of a seminal publication, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, which was published in several editions between 1874 and 1951. While Notes and Queries has been of considerable interest to historians of anthropology, its connections to museum anthropology and to material culture studies have, to a large degree, gone unexamined hitherto. [Keywords: Fieldwork, Museum History, History of Anthropology, United Kingdom]

The full paper can be accessed here. Also related is an earlier blog post on the Relational Museum project, which can be found here. My thanks go to Dr. Petch for her valuable and interesting contribution to the journal.

Constructing Identities on Marbles and Terracotta

Museum Anthropology 30(1), which has just been published in AnthroSource features two peer-reviewed articles, the first of which is a paper titled "Constructing Identities on Marbles and Terracotta: Representations of Classical Heritage in Greece and Turkey" by Božidar Jezernik, a professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of, among other books, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers (Saqi Books, 2004). The abstract for Professor Jezernik paper is as follows:

During the late 18th century and after, Western Europeans construed ancient Greece as an exceptional land, peopled not with humans, but with super-humans. As a result, modern Greeks were cast in the role of the living ancestors of European civilization. When they passed the antiquities laws and built museums for their preservation, they were imagined as true beneficiaries of their forefathers, even though not yet fully adequate for keeping their prestigious heritage. However, when the Ottomans endeavored to “modernize” their country and developed their interest in preserving antiquities, the “history-conscious” West judged their efforts by much different standards. [Keywords: museum history, Ottoman Empire, cultural property, historical consciousness, Orientalism]

The entire paper can be accessed here. I want to extend my thanks to Professor Jezernik for his rich contribution to the history of museum anthropology. Tomorrow I will post a notice related to the issue's second peer-review article.

Wanted: Curator of Collections and Exhibitions

The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, a non-profit museum and exhibition space in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood, invites applications for the contracted position of Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, beginning June 1, 2007.

The Curator will be responsible for overseeing the Institute’s permanent collection, which consists of over eight hundred works of art by 20th-century Ukrainian, Ukrainian diaspora, and central and eastern European artists. The collection has particularly strong holdings in postwar art and works on paper. The position will require designing and implementing policies for the cataloging, care, and expansion of the collection; identifying works that require conservation and overseeing the hiring of outside contractors for conservation work; responding to requests for loans and documentation; and maintaining research files on past exhibitors and artists represented in the collection. The Curator will also plan and execute five to six temporary exhibitions each year on the premises of the Institute. He or she will seek out and field potential exhibitors, and will implement and install these exhibitions.

The Curator will report directly to the President, and will oversee student interns who will assist in collection care and exhibition planning. He or she will also have access to the resources and assistance of the Institute’s existing volunteer committees.

The successful candidate will have a strong knowledge of modern and contemporary visual art and culture, with a demonstrated interest in Ukrainian or central and eastern European art.

He or she will have a minimum of two years of experience working in a museum or gallery environment, and direct experience in exhibition planning and collection management. A graduate degree in a related field such as museum or curatorial studies, conservation, art history, library science, or arts administration is preferred, but applicants with equivalent professional experience will be considered. The working language of the Institute is English, but preference will be given to candidates who have knowledge of Ukrainian, or those who have an interest in learning basic Ukrainian language skills. The ideal candidate will have strong relationship building skills and will be required to report on his activities on a frequent basis to the Institute’s Executive Committee and Board of Directors. The annual salary for the position is $32,000 to $40,000, contingent on experience. The application is for a seven-month contract beginning June 1, 2007, renewable for up to two years pending budgetary approval.

Please send a detailed letter of application, curriculum vitae, documentation or samples of recent curatorial or writing projects, and the names of three professional references by March 15, 2007 to: Search Committee, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2320 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622. No phone calls please.