Across the former Confederate states and around Europe, statues are being pulled down by cranes and crowds, as protests about symbols of racism and hate blanket the globe in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. For some context we turn to Dr. Victoria S. Reed, Sadler Curator for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is one of a handful of full-time curators in the U.S. tasked with researching the ownership history of objects offered to and in the museum’s collections—and is an expert in sorting out the evidence informing legal, ethical, and moral claims on artworks. We discuss collections built from colonial plunder abroad, Nazi loot, objects caught up in the illicit trade in the U.S., and what it will mean for museums to decolonize both their holdings and their attitudes.
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