Repatriation, Repositioning, Rearrangement

 Repatriation



Unidentified Artist

Hand-held Clapper with Bird of Prophecy

17th- 18th century

1988.472

 

The royal palace, Benin City; probably taken by British forces during the Punitive Expedition, 1897. Lois Dailey Orswell, Pomfret Center, CT, by 1972, gift; to the Harvard University Art Museums, 1988

 



Unidentified Artist

Three Figures (from the north side of the east wall of Mogao Cave 323 Dunhuang, Gansu province)

7th century

1924.40

 

The two objects I chose for the section entitled repatriation represent Harvard Art Museums connections plunder in the name of imperialism. The Hand-held Clapper with Bird of Prophecy from the royal palace of Benin City was likely extracted during the Benin Expedition (Punitive Expedition) of 1897 under Admiral Sir Harry Rawson of the United Kingdom. The military forces, under Admiral Rawson’s lead, plundered and devastated the West African Kingdom of Benin.[1] Lois Dailey Orswell, a collector of abstract expressionist art and modern sculpture, gifted the work in 1988.[2]Of the objects in the Harvard Art Museums collections, there are many works of questionable provenance that would require recontextualization and potentially repatriation.

 

The mural painting Three Figures (from the north side of the east wall of Mogao Cave 323, Dunhuang, Gansu province) depicts three figures engaged in labor. Their bodies seem to be void of any level grounding and their bodies abstracted. The central figure holds a mallet above his head mid-swing while the other two figures’ actions seem much less clear. The Tang Dynasty painting was extracted from Dunhuang during the First Fogg Expedition to China led by Langdon Warner.[3] Warner led several expeditions to China that helped expand the collections at the Fogg Museum and the Nelson Atkins in Kansas. 

 

The issue of repatriation requires that audiences and museum professionals alike reckon with the violent histories of plunder and imperialism that built up Western powers while devastating other corners of the globe. Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s The Restitiution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics explore the very difficult act of repatriation as a moral obligation that restores agency. The introduction opens with the statement by Professor Joseph Ki-Zerbo stating the need for a separation from the colonial power of France.[4] Repatriation entails a confrontation with the darkest parts of history to make room for reclamation.

 

Repositioning




Carrie Mae Weems, American (Portland, Oregon, USA born 1953) 

You Became a Scientific Profile 

1995-1996
Monochrome c-print with sandblasted text on glass
P2001.28.1 



Carrie Mae Weems, American (Portland, Oregon, USA born 1953) 

You Became a Scientific Profile / A Negroid Type / An Anthropological Debate 

/ & A Photographic Subject 

1995-1996
Monochrome c-prints with sandblasted text on glass
P2001.28.1-4 

The section entitled Repositioning pairs two works from Carrie Mae Weems series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. The two works feature appropriated photographs of two enslaved people, Renty and Delia. Weems recovered the photographs from Harvard University’s Peabody collection and used them in her series. The photographs are but two of several images taken by John T. Zealy at the request of Louis Agassiz in 1850. 

 

The notion of repositioning argues, for me, a methodology by which historian and artist can re-engage artifacts, to examine the complexity of history. In this week’s readings, the authors grapple with repositioning as a result of globalization and the rise of global history. The convergence of many local narrative runs the risk of flattening of history which consumes the local within the global. 

 

Weems repositions the histories of Renty and Delia and the photographic histories of racial pseudoscience in the series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. 

 

Rearrangement

 

Romare Bearden, American (Charlotte, NC 1911 - 1988 New York, NY) 

Soul History 

1969
1997.210 

 


Unidentified Artist

Wooden Face Mask

Somi Clan

 

The final section, Rearrangement, focuses on the reconfiguration of aesthetic influence within art history. Romare Bearden’s Soul History embodies a myriad of influences including jazz and African sculpture—by proxy including European modernist art. The Wooden Face Mask housed in the Peabody Museum serves to ground Bearden’s influence and open consideration for the many crosscurrents of influence that mark the global condition that often becomes consumed in the simplistic rhetoric of modernity. 


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benin_Expedition_of_1897

[2] https://research.frick.org/directory/detail/1020

[3] https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/210041?position=1

[4] http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf

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