Pozen Center Engages 'Cultures of Restitution'

What is a given piece of art’s rightful home? The question has been asked often and loudly in recent years, as many museums in the West have faced demands to return artwork looted from former colonies.

This year the Pozen Center took up these debates and connected them to the broader human rights project. In May the center hosted “Cultures of Restitution: Decolonial Histories, Justice, and the Museum,” a workshop for scholars and museum practitioners co-led by Pozen Faculty Director Mark Philip Bradley and Assistant Professor of History Alice Goff. The center also introduced a new course covering similar themes.

“Decolonization is set to be a central topic in the academic study of human rights for years to come,” says Bradley. “This workshop and new course were opportunities to strengthen our engagement with the subject by looking at how decolonization plays out in the art and museum worlds – and how fascinatingly complex the search for justice in the sphere of cultural production can be. These are topics that will resonate for years to come.”

Restitution’s Origins

The “Cultures of Restitution” workshop, held on May 3 and 4 in collaboration with the Neubauer Collegium, approached the idea of restitution from multiple disciplinary angles, including law, sociology, and museum curation. (See the full list of panelists and their topics.) 

Participants sought not to resolve the question of where any individual artwork belongs, but instead to examine where restitution claims originate, what makes them hard to resolve, and how they can affect artmaking and art discourse.

While cultural restitution’s regular presence in news headlines is a relatively new phenomenon, it is an idea with a long and intricate history. Workshop participants touched on restitution conversations and initiatives the Napoleonic Wars, colonial America, post-World War II Europe, and every stage of the post-colonial era.

As many participants noted, original drafts of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention included prohibitions against “cultural vandalism” (what might now be called “cultural genocide”), but these prohibitions were vetoed by the US and European colonial powers looking to avoid negative attention to their own histories as settlers and colonizers.

Patty Gerstenblith, Faculty Director of the DePaul University Center for Art, Museum, and Cultural Heritage Law, noted that this history made it particularly welcome to be having a conversation about restitution hosted by a human rights center.

Notes of Caution AND Complexity

All panelists endorsed the general principle that stolen objects should be returned to their original owners. But many also sounded notes of caution, arguing that restitution isn’t always as easy as simply “sending everything back,” and also that, in some forms, restitution debates can become a means of avoiding harder questions.

Numerous participants highlighted practical obstacles to restitution, especially on the standard model of returning property to its individual or institutional owners. Identifying exactly where artwork “originally” came from – which Jewish family it was stolen from, which part of the Khmer Empire it was looted from – can be difficult, bordering on impossible. Many of the objects in question have been poorly preserved, despite having been confiscated on the grounds that only Western institutions had the proper preservation expertise; others weren’t originally meant to have a permanent existence. 

In addition to these practical objections, many participants focused on the possibility that restitution – a demand in the name of justice – could be co-opted for other ends. Cresa Pugh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the New School reminded participants that ideas about the value of culture have a long history of being intertwined with the appropriation of property from poor countries to richer ones, who argue that only they have the skills to preserve it. This context does not discredit the idea of restitution, Pugh noted, but it does suggest grounds for wariness.

Jonathan Bach, Professor of Global Studies at The New School, explored how the German government’s attempts at identifying the proper owners of artwork taken from former colonies was an undertaking with worthwhile elements but a constant need for skepticism: “The goal of sensitizing Europeans to colonial legacies can be used as an alibi to buy good conscience at a cheap price,” he pointed out. 

Miriam Brusius, a research fellow at London’s German Historical Institute, struck a similar note, pointing out that, in some cases, talk of restitution distracts from other possibilities like reparations payments, or the broader decolonization of museum structures.

RESTITUION DISCOURSE AS CREATIVE INSPIRATION

Multiple workshop attendees touched on how, over time, concepts of restitution and ownership have been incorporated into new artworks, new approaches to curation, and new forms of activism. 

Nicholas Revire, a research fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, showed slides of paintings by the Cambodian artist Leang Seckon, including one where Khmer Empire sculptures of Buddha are shown making a journey from Cambodia through the international art market. 

Eunsong Kim, a poet and professor at Northeastern University, discussed the work of the American artist Carrie Mae Weems, who publicly sparred with Harvard University about whether she had the right to make use of daguerreotype images of enslaved men held in a Harvard museum. 

Alaka Wali, a retired curator at Chicago’s Field Museum, shared the story of how critiques embedded in a 2018 Field installation by the Kanza artist Chris Pappan helped prompt the museum to radically reconsider its approach to Indigenous history and art. The museum now practices restitution in many forms, including not only the return of artworks but also the reworking and repair of objects by contemporary Indigenous artists, and the sharing of resources and skills between the museum and Indigenous communities.

The final presentation of the day came from a practicing artist: Chidi Nwabauni, London-based founder of the artist collective LOOTY, which has experimented with the “digital repatriation” of looted objects in Western museums, like a well-publicized “heist” of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum. LOOTY did not literally steal the stone; instead, they staged heist-themed imagery that suggested the possibility. The group also created digital tools that allow people in the Egyptian town of Rashid (where the Rosetta Stone lived before being taken) to view a virtual version of the stone as if it had been returned.

“It’s about the power to tell your own story, after years of having it told by someone else,” Nwaubani explained.

The Conversation Continues

On the morning after the workshop, the participants visited the Field Museum, where Wali led them through “Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories,” the exhibit that represents the museum's revised approaches to Indigenous material. They discussed the various forms to restitution the exhibit embodied (and might yet embody in the future). They also began discussing the possibility of a special journal issue or edited volume following up on some of the workshop’s lines of inquiry.

Meanwhile, within the Pozen Center, conference co-organizer and Faculty Director Mark Philip Bradley was excited to bring the workshop’s themes to participants in the center’s  Paris Study Abroad Program, where he taught “Loot, Empire, and the Decolonial: Human Rights and the Politics of Cultural Restitution.”

On a visit to London, Bradley and his students visited the British museum to look at the Benin Bronzes, statues that were looted from the Benin Kingdom (in what is now Nigeria) by the British in the late nineteenth century. They also visited the Serpentine Gallery to see the work of Yinka Shonibare, a British artist of Nigerian heritage whose has played extensively with the theme of restitution in his work. Some of his sculptures reference objects like the Benin Bronzes; others represent British imperial figures, offering commentary on the interplay of empire and art.

In a very literal connection with the May 3 workshop, Chidi Nwaubani of LOOTY made the visit from London to visit Bradley's class and discuss his work.

Bradley became interested in restitution discourse while researching his next book, a history of how the concept of The Third World was replaced over time by the idea of The Global South. As Bradley explained in his recent Pozen News Spotlight, this book was partially inspired by another UChicago gathering: "What is an Artistic Practice of Human Rights?", a multi-day summit co-presented by the Pozen Center, the Logan Center for the Arts, and the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.