From Ownership to Stewardship

In 1964 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) convened a Committee of Experts from thirty states to address the destruction of cultural heritage engendered by the flourishing illegal trade in antiquities and other cultural property. The committee’s work ultimately led to the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which was adopted at the 16th General Conference in November 1970. To date, 143 countries, including the United States, have ratified the convention. Further guidance from national and international museum organizations, such as North America’s Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), has helped museums and other arts entities contend with the legal, ethical, and moral obligations of owning important cultural property. Many institutions have added provenance experts, who specialize in researching the ownership histories of objects, to their staffs.  

The Princeton University Art Museum hired its first curator of provenance, MaryKate Cleary, last summer. In September 2024 she served as the moderator of a panel discussion that brought together Princeton curators and provenance specialists from major museums—an event intended to signal a new era in work on provenance at Princeton. Organized by Carolyn Laferrière, associate curator of ancient Mediterranean art, the panel included Perrin Lathrop, assistant curator of African art; Victoria Reed, the Sadler Senior Curator of Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Joanna Gohmann, provenance researcher and object historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. 

Provenance research can tell the story of an object’s movement through space and time and can offer glimpses into institutions’ collecting practices and priorities as they change over time. The panel provided a welcome opportunity to hear from specialists at institutions with very different collecting histories that share a commitment to this work as part of their mission. In his opening remarks, Museum Director James Steward reflected on past museum practices that tended to focus on responding reactively to specific situations rather than proactively engaging in this work as part of core, ongoing operations:

It is past time to take a new position. If museums are to retain the public trust, as we must, we need to move from a posture of reaction to one of action and proactivity. We must adopt a stance of radical transparency about what we know and what we do not know about the objects in our care. We must be vigilant about the works already in our collections and about all the works we are considering acquiring, not just those we perceive to be at some higher level of risk. We must move beyond aspiring to meet legal standards to consider the ethical dimensions of cultural property ownership.

These themes, particularly the commitment to transparency, resonated throughout the panelists’ presentations and the subsequent discussion. A critical component of this work for all four specialists was the need to make provenance readily available online. Princeton has invested significant resources in publishing its existing provenance research in the Museum’s online collections database; as of the date of the panel, the records associated with 22,000 objects had been updated and made available. Work will continue until the records for all objects contain easily discoverable provenance information—or, in some cases, document the lack thereof. Reed presented examples from the Museum of Fine Arts’ website that share detailed notes documenting provenance research, explaining, “Our most important goal is transparency with our research results. . . . We are a public institution. We are an educational institution. We have many audiences to whom we are responsible.”  

This commitment to transparency extends to the presentation of works in museum galleries. Lathrop discussed planning for Princeton’s new Museum facility with an eye to the institutional commitment to telling stories through ownership histories as part of the inaugural collections installation. As she explained regarding the galleries of African art, “One of the themes that will be explored is collecting histories that provide insight into the different networks through which art from Africa circulated to Princeton in the twentieth century.” She particularly focused on a gallery case that will display exceptional works from a collection of objects given in 1947 by Joyce Doyle in memory of her husband, Donald Doyle, Class of 1905—a bequest of works she had purchased before 1923 in what was then the Belgian Congo, notorious for its brutal exploitation of people and resources. The installation will present new research on Joyce Doyle’s collecting practices and raise critical issues about the historical context of her time in Africa. 

The panelists agreed that as museums seek to develop more ethical approaches to cultural property ownership, it is essential to adhere to the highest standards, both in regard to existing collections and for the research associated with new acquisitions. Key to such work is the development of long-term relationships with countries and communities of origin that focus on collaboration and reciprocity. “While this kind of work can be complicated and take a long time, and it often takes place away from the public eye,” Laferrière notes, “it presents exciting opportunities to build relationships with colleagues at other institutions and in other countries. It is only by working collaboratively that we can build and exchange our knowledge of the histories of the objects in our care, provide access to these artworks’ histories, and develop reciprocal relationships across institutions.”