Symposium examines legal, ethical 'ownership' of cultural artifacts

A discussion of the legal and ethical "ownership" of objects in museum and private art collections will take place this Saturday, Oct. 24, 1-4 p.m. at Cornell's Johnson Museum of Art. It is free and open to the public.

Speakers will explore such questions as: Who owns the artifacts of a culture? Where do objects belong? How should museums balance their responsibilities to cultural groups who made or first owned these objects with their responsibilities to collect and preserve and educate?

Current controversies include a lawsuit filed against the Seattle Art Museum over an Henri Matisse painting in its collection that was in a Jewish collection confiscated by the Nazis in 1941. Two U.S. court cases are under way involving American private collectors who are alleged to have purchased ancient artworks that were essentially looted from Turkey and Italy, their countries of origin.

"Museums are public institutions that have an ethical responsibility toward the original owners of artworks, be they Jews whose art collections were lost to the Nazis or to living members of Asian, African, Latino or Native American cultures," said Frank Robinson, the Richard J. Schwartz Director of the Johnson Museum. "The issues of this symposium raise very timely and complex questions."

Speakers include Hector Feliciano, a leading expert on the Nazi art seizures and Hitler's drive to amass an art collection; Ricardo J. Elia, who teaches archaeological law and ethics at Boston University and has written on the worldwide looting of archaeological sites and the international antiquities market; John Henderson, professor of anthropology at Cornell and a specialist in the Mayan culture, who has advised governments in Honduras on management of archaeological sites; and Peter Jemison, chair of the Iroquois Repatriation Committee and manager for Ganondagon, an Iroquois site.

The event is co-sponsored by the Johnson Museum and Cornell's departments of Anthropology and Archaeology.

For more information, call Cathy Rosa Klimaszewski at the Johnson Museum, 254-4627, or e-mail crk7@cornell.edu.