Returning What Was Taken: How Museums Approach Repatriation

Western museums are increasingly grappling with a growing number of requests for repatriation - the highly politicized process of returning artwork, cultural items, and human remains to their home countries and communities. Join us for a conversation about how cultural institutions are wrestling with, as well as presenting exhibitions about, these demands. First, Sam Sackeroff, the Lerman-Neubauer Associate Curator at the Jewish Museum will discuss the institution's recent exhibit, Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art. Then Erin Thompson, America's only professor of art crimes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, explores contemporary cases for repatriation, including sacred Nepalese Materials, some of which remain in Western institutions.

This event is a collaboration between the Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) and the Museum and Gallery Studies Program in the Art and Design Department at Queensborough Community College (QCC). It is co-sponsored by the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College; the Ray Wolpow Institute at Western Washington University; the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University; the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center; and the Museum Studies MA Program at the CUNY School of Professional Studies.  

 

Photo: Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College, CUNY.