museums

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• SOURCE: Seattle Times
  9/16/2022
  

  New York Museums to Disclose Provenance of Pieces Looted by Nazis

  The Metropolitan Museum has currently identified 53 works as seized or sold under duress by Nazis. It is unclear how many more it will identify in response to a new state law requiring the display of those pieces to disclose the conditions of acquisition. 

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• 8/28/2022
  

  Stephen Aron's Work Examines Moments of Intercultural Peace in the West

  by James Thornton Harris

  Both triumphalist and revisionist histories of America's westward expansion emphasize violence, and disagree about whether to understand it with pride or guilt. But what can we make of the moments where understanding and accommodation temporarily prevailed? 

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• SOURCE: Forbes
  8/9/2022
  

  Alexandria, VA Freedom House Museum Reopens, Making Key Site of Slave Trade a Center for Black History

  The building, once the headquarters of the Franklin and Armfield firm, once the largest domestic slave traders in the United States, now houses a reopened museum showing the DC area as a key site of Black history before and after emancipation. 

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• How We Told the Ongoing Story of Title IX

  by Laura Mogulescu

  A curator and her team chose to center the work of activists who pushed to determine the scope and meaning of Title IX's prohibition on sex discrimination in education throughout the law's 50-year history. Their exhibit is now open at the New-York Historical Society.

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• SOURCE: Harvard Gazette
  5/16/2022
  

  Harvard Peabody Museum Returns Sacred Scrolls to White Earth Tribe

  Professor Philip Deloria praised the repatriation of the artifacts as a "rebalancing" of accounts between the tribe and the university. 

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• SOURCE: The Grio
  5/4/2022
  

  Smithsonian Announces Plans to Return Looted, Unethically Sourced Artifacts

  Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch III announced the museum's intention to be a world leading institution on repatriating artifacts and promoting reconciliation for colonialism through museums. 

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• SOURCE: Vanity Fair
  4/21/2022
  

  Previewing Tulsa's New Bob Dylan Center

  by Douglas Brinkley

  "The center—a high-tech vessel holding the man’s oeuvre and an overview of the man—will be the spiritual home of Dylan, a relentless performer who is forever on the road."

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• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  4/10/2022
  

  Are Museums Ready to Reckon with Ill-Gotten Human Remains?

  The acquisition of many skeletal specimens by museums was entangled with the harvesting of tissues from the bodies of the socially marginalized. 

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• SOURCE: New York Historical Society
  4/7/2022
  

  "Title IX: Activism On and Off the Field" Coming to NYHS in May

  The exhibition features images, objects, and documents drawn from New-York Historical’s Women’s Sports Foundation and Billie Jean King’s archives.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/8/2022
  

  Smithsonian to Return All Benin Bronzes

  The Smithsonian will return works that it has legal title to own but that are linked to an infamous British raid on Benin City in 1897.

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• 3/6/2022
  

  The Power and Urgency of Public History

  by David M. Chamberlain

  After a tour of the South's historical sites, I maintain a teacher’s optimism that knowledge of our nation’s imperfect past offers us the necessary wisdom to walk ourselves back from the edge of the political ledge on which we are so perilously perched.

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• SOURCE: Hyperallergic
  

  Mississippi Museum of Art Exhibition Opens on Legacies of Great Migration

  Opening April 9, this exhibition features newly commissioned works by 12 acclaimed Black contemporary artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Theaster Gates, and more.

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• SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
  2/14/2022
  

  A Guide to Touring Alabama's Civil Rights Trail

  Two AJC reporters offer a guide to those interested in marking Black History Month with a tour of Alabama's major civil rights sites, memorials and museums. 

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• SOURCE: Paste
  2/14/2022
  

  A Civil Rights Tour of America

  Writer Garrett Martin identifies the key sites on a tour of civil rights history institutions in Atlanta, Alabama, Memphis and Washington. 

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• SOURCE: NPR
  1/20/2022
  

  Museum of Natural History in New York Removes Theodore Roosevelt Statue

  While Roosevelt's support of natural history has been noted, museum officials acknowledged that the statue "communicates a racial hierarchy" that constitutes a darker side of the former president's legacy.

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• SOURCE: NPR
  1/17/2022
  

  A Texas-Born Princess and Former Scandalous Washington Wife May Lose Roman Villa in Epic Inheritance Fight

  Princess Rita Boncompagni-Ludovisi, born Rita Carpenter, the former wife of Congressman John Jenrette, has worked for 19 years to make Rome's Villa Aurora accessible to scholars. 

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• SOURCE: WGBH
  1/4/2022
  

  New Boston MFA Exhibit Shows Museum's Complex History of Censoring Queer Desire

  by Erin L. Thompson

  "When I first visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as a young and deeply closeted queer college student, I found myself wondering if the museum possessed ancient Greek vases decorated with anything other than sex scenes."

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• SOURCE: Contingent
  12/8/2021
  

  The Second Skeleton

  by Mabel Rosenheck

  "Museums construct knowledge. As a historian of museums this is what I study. But museums don’t just construct knowledge through architecture, collecting, arrangement, or labeling. They construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally."

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• 12/12/2021
  

  Acquiring Eyes: The Unlikely Cross-Cultural Partnership Behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

  by Charles Dellheim

  The world of American art collecting was transformed by the unlikely partnership of the Boston Brahmin Isabella Stewart Gardner and the ambitious Russian Jewish immigrant Bernhard Berenson.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  12/7/2021
  

  Met Acquires Landmark Photo Archive of NY Black Life

  “[James Van Der Zee] is a central figure, a significant artist, in telling the story of people of African descent,” said Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum. “The photographs are testaments to beauty and power, and he captured the Harlem community and the African American community in all its possibilities.”