Last year, the Thai government sent a letter to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco requesting the return of four ancient bronze statues depicting Buddhist spiritual figures — buddhas and bodhisattvas.
" We did some initial research on these," said Natasha Reichle, the museum's associate curator of Southeast Asian art. "It was not too difficult to determine that they were looted."
Stolen around 60 years ago in a massive art heist, the statues are soon heading home to Thailand. But before they leave, the museum is explaining how these artifacts wound up in its collection in the first place in the exhibition Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities. This effort is indicative of a growing trend: Museums opening up about dark truths.
"I would love audiences to think of the return of these objects not as in any way a loss," Reichle said, noting that the exhibition explores complex questions to do with cultural heritage, ownership, and restitution. "And it's also, I hope, a way to form relationships with countries in Southeast Asia that's based on equity and collaboration."
Turning a blind eye to questionable provenance
Reichle said these statues were among the many stolen in the mid-1960s from the ruins of a temple in a remote part of northeast Thailand.
The looted statues were sold to private collectors and museums around the world by a London art dealer. Four of them were gifted to the Asian Art Museum by a major donor.
Even back then, Reichle said, her institution had suspicions about their sketchy provenance. "You can see in the correspondence that they were concerned about the legality of this, but pretty much ignored it, put it to the side, and went ahead."
Changing values
Until about a decade ago, most museums in the West didn't think too deeply about questions of provenance when it came to acknowledging — let alone making amends for — looted works in their collections.
"The museum sector stance was much more, 'We're the authorities, we're the experts, we're going to talk about these things we've studied in other cultures," said Elizabeth Merritt, the founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums.
But a growing number of requests from overseas authorities for the return of stolen artifacts, along with prominent investigations in the U.S. media and government around a few of these cases has led to a shift in the public's understanding of what museums do — and a shift in museums' own values.
Many museums are now re-evaluating their traditional role as universal custodians of the world's heritage and culture.
"There's a larger public consciousness now about what museums are," said Stephen Murphy, a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, who researches looted Southeast Asian art. "Like, 'Why do you have all this material from different cultures around the world? And how did you get it?' "
Murphy said that's why museums are not only having more open conversations with the countries and communities whose artifacts were stolen, but also with the museum-going public.
"There's such an appetite with the general public to understand how objects came into their collections," Murphy said. "And I think if museums engage more openly with this, they will be able to develop a greater understanding among the museum-going public of the issues that museums face."
The challenges facing museums
Those issues are substantial.
Many museums, including the Asian Art Museum, don't have the money and staff to deeply research questions of provenance. And sometimes it can be difficult to identify what government or group has standing to receive these artifacts.
Figuring out the answers to these questions takes significant time. And museums may have thousands of objects, only some of which are on public display. Many are in storage, awaiting potential research.
Also, some museums still worry that the countries requesting these objects won't be able to look after them.
As the American Alliance of Museums' Merritt points out, caring for and researching significant cultural heritage is what museums do.
"I think it's really important that the public understand that museums steward these vast collections for the benefit of the public, and what it takes to take care of those things," Merritt said.
Talking to the public
The Asian Art Museum is just one institution confronting these competing forces out in the open.
There's also an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., which tells the story of sculptures stolen during a British raid on Benin City, Nigeria, in the late 1800s. The Smithsonian repatriated 29 of these co-called "Benin Bronzes" in its collection in 2022, and borrowed nine back from the Nigerian government for the exhibition.
And the Museum of Food and Drink in New York recently held a public event ahead of the repatriation of more than 50 antique Mesoamerican artifacts to Mexico and other countries.
"It's really a celebration of the way that we are retelling history from the perspective of the people who made the history and not necessarily the people who came in and changed the history," said Catherine Piccoli, the museum's curatorial director.
The global museum community has been watching the evolution of American attitudes towards repatriation with interest. Udomluck Hoontrakul, the director of the Thammasat Museum of Anthropology at Thammasat University in Thailand, said she admires the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco's efforts to engage its visitors around these issues.
"This helps audiences understand the broader situation in which these objects were taken," Hoontrakul said. "And it highlights the violence and exploitation involved in the illicit trade of cultural property."
Jennifer Vanasco edited the broadcast and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner produced the audio.
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