Author: Emily Hayflick

Via The New York Times, April 25, 2023

TEMPE, Ariz. — A cigar store Indian “princess” stands alone in a corner here at the Arizona State University Art Museum, gazing toward gallery walls, not the viewer. Ten miles away, the Phoenix Art Museum is preparing a rare show of the Cuban contemporary artist Juan Francisco Elso. The Baltimore Museum of Art recently opened an expansive multimedia exhibit celebrating 50 years of hip-hop. The Plains Art Museum in North Dakota is honoring an Indigenous tribe.

While these shows would appear unrelated, they all reflect a realization among museums around the country that visitors want to see more than just paintings by American and European artists, most of them white, most of them male and many of them dead. As metropolitan areas grow in racial, ethnic and cultural diversity, museums are increasingly adding exhibitions to attract a wider audience by showing a broader array of artists and explaining why their work is worth appreciating.

More here. 

Dear CMA Community,

I am thrilled to announce that the management of the CMA blog has passed on to Emily Hayflick, PhD student in anthropology at Cornell University.

It has been my absolute joy to manage the blog—thank you all for providing me with such a strong sense of community over the past nine years. And a very special thank you to Jennifer Shannon for bringing me on all those years ago.

I will still be involved in CMA through my role as secretary of the Board and chair of the communications committee, and look forward to seeing all of you at future AAA meetings and CMA events.

All my best,
Lillia McEnaney
Secretary of the Board, Council for Museum Anthropology

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Hello All,

I am delighted to join the CMA communications committee as blog manager.

To provide you all with a brief introduction—I study environmental anthropology focused on the materiality of U.S. conservation policy and have a background in archaeology and museum work. While I am most familiar with natural history museums, I am excited to provide resources for diverse museum and anthropological interests through the blog.

I look forward to meeting and getting to know you all and am excited to begin my work with CMA.

Best wishes,
Emily Hayflick
hayflick.cma@gmail.com

Via ProPublica, April 25, 2023

Stepping into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shyanne Beatty was eager to view the Native American works that art collectors Charles and Valerie Diker had been accumulating for nearly half a century. But as she entered the museum’s American Wing that day in 2018, her excitement turned to shock as two wooden masks came into view.

Beatty, an Alaska Native, had worked on a radio documentary about the two Alutiiq objects and how they and others like them had been plundered from tribal land about 150 years ago. Now, the masks were on display in the biggest and most esteemed art museum in the Western Hemisphere. “It was super shocking to me,” she said.

The Met’s ownership history for the masks, also known as provenance, omits more than a century of their whereabouts. Historians say the masks were taken in 1871. But the museum’s timeline doesn’t start until 2003, when the Dikers bought them from a collector. Ownership was transferred to the Met in 2017.

The Dikers, who have amassed one of the most significant private collections of Native American works, have been donating or lending objects to the Met since 1993. In 2017, as other institutions grappled with returning colonial-era spoils, the Met announced the Dikers’ gift of another 91 Native American works.

A ProPublica review of records the museum has posted online found that only 15% of the 139 works donated or loaned by the Dikers over the years have solid or complete ownership histories, with some lacking any provenance at all. Most either have no histories listed, leave gaps in ownership ranging from 200 to 2,000 years or identify previous owners in such vague terms as an “English gentleman” and “a family in Scotland.”

More here.