News
Activists Stand Trial for Protest in French Museum Over Plundered Artifacts
Members of a Pan-African group stood trial in Paris on charges of attempted theft for an action staged at the city’s Quai Branly Museum.
Restitution
News
A Bill Offers California’s Indigenous Tribes Ownership of Ancestral Objects
Also, a work by Paolo Uccello, sold in a Sotheby’s sale this July for $3.1 million, was revealed to be looted by Nazis.
Art
Objects Returned to Benin by French Collectors Had Been Removed From a Contested Auction
The transaction illuminates the role individuals can play in rectifying Europe's history of colonial plunder, but it also reveals the inner workings of a system that allows such objects to land in private hands to begin with.
In Brief
Benin Receives $22.5 Million Loan From France for New Museum
The new museum will house the return of 26 cultural artifacts on long-term loan from France. The objects were originally seized by French troops from Benin in 1892.
News
Decolonize This Place Demands Repatriation of "Imperial Plunder" at the Brooklyn Museum
Parallel to today's protest at the RISD Museum, organizers from Decolonize This Place gathered at the Brooklyn Museum to decry stolen objects in the Brooklyn Museum's collection.
News
Protesters Request RISD Museum Return Bronze Sculpture to Nigeria
Students and faculty from the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University held an action today to request a sculpture looted from the Kingdom of Benin be returned. The museum says they have begun conversations with the Nigerian government to return the bronze.
Art
Understanding the Migrant Caravan in the Context of Imperial Plunder and Dispossession
The publication of Felwine Sarr and Benedicte Savoy’s report recommending the restitution of stolen African objects and the approach of what is called a “migrant caravan” toward the US is not a coincidence.
News
French President Wants to Return Benin's Artifacts, But Will French Law Allow Him?
Emmanuel Macron's decision is a gesture of goodwill, but these objects comprise just 0.5 percent of the objects requested for restitution by the West African country.
News
President of France Will Recommend Full Restitution of Looted African Works
The proposed guidelines would bristle the French art world, but they could also endear the French president to the African countries he's trying to build stronger economic partnerships with.
In Brief
Guggenheim Museum Returns Looted Painting to a German Art Dealer’s Heirs
When Alfred Flechtheim fled Germany, an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting of his ended up in the hands of a Nazi, and eventually at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim.
In Brief
Protesters and Police Clash as Artifacts Seized from Catalan Museum
Law enforcement officers arrived at the Museu de Lleida in western Catalonia around 4am this morning to execute an order to repatriate 44 artifacts to neighboring Aragon.
News
The Met Museum Hands Over Another Antiquity Believed to Be Stolen
A foot-tall sculpture of a bull's head was handed over to Manhattan's district attorney last month at Lebanon's request, but collectors from Colorado are claiming to be its rightful owners.