The NYC cultural
institution sent the objects to the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica
as an "as an unrestricted gift"
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Costa Rican Minister
of Culture and Youth Sylvie Durán (right) examines
some of the newly returned artifacts. (Museo Nacional de Costa
Rica)
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The Brooklyn Museum
in New York City has voluntarily returned 1,305 pre-Hispanic artifactsincluding
stone figurines, ceramic vessels and toolsto the Museo
Nacional de Costa Rica in San
José.
As Alvaro Murillo reports for Reuters,
the objects arrived in the Central American country late last year.
Per a statement,
the New York cultural institution previously sent 981 ceramic vessels
back to Costa Rica in 2011.
Both gifts were unprompted, meaning that the Brooklyn Museum sent
the items without receiving a formal request or undergoing a judicial
process.
"Over 12 years, the collection was cataloged and photographed and
2,281 pieces were approved for deaccession based upon the established
criteria," Nancy
Rosoff, the Brooklyn Museum's senior curator of arts from the
Americas, tells Artnet
News' Taylor Dafoe. "... We initiated conversations with
the National Museum of Costa Rica to see if they wanted the collection
and they accepted the objects as an unrestricted gift."
Highlights of the newly returned trove include a medium-sized tombstone,
a large vase painted with beeswax, household utensils, sculptures,
and metates
(or grinding stones) from Guanacaste. According to Artnet News,
some of the items date back more than 2,000 years and are associated
with now-vanished cultures.
These piecesas well as the ones returned by the museum in
2011are among the roughly 16,000 taken from Costa Rica by
American railroad tycoon Minor
Cooper Keith. As Kate Taylor reported for the New
York Times in 2010, workers discovered the artifacts on
banana plantations owned by Keith in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Around 4,500 of the 16,000 items ended up in the Brooklyn
Museum's collections following Keith's death in 1929, writes Alex
Greenberger for ARTnews.
To ensure his businesses' success, Keith exploited Costa Rica's
Indigenous workforce. Speaking with Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei
of NPR's "Throughline"
last January, journalist Dan
Koeppelauthor of Banana:
The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the Worldcompared the
tycoon's laborers to enslaved people.
"It's an era of sanctioned slavery with the support of the United
States government," Koeppel explained.
According to the statement, Keith's family "donated, loaned and
sold" the objects he'd seized prior to the passage of a 1938
law restricting the export of cultural heritage items from Costa
Rica.
"The recovery of these archaeological pieces means recovering fragments
of our past that crossed our borders when we still did not have
legislation to prevent it," says Sylvie
Durán, the Costa Rican minister of culture and youth,
in the statement. "With this second and last batch that we receive
from the Keith collection, we direct the process of registering
and analyzing each of the pieces, so that they can be appreciated
in the future, once their respective cataloging is completed."
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Ceramic vessel featuring
checkered pattern
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Ceramic vessels from
the collection
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Close-up shot of a large
stone metate, or grinding stone
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Curators returned the items after three years of planning, including
discussions on how best to register, catalog, package and transport
the artifacts. After experts ironed out the logistics, they shipped
the artifacts by sea in 31 cured wooden containers. Per ARTnews,
the Costa Rican museum plans to eventually exhibit a selection of
the pieces in a gallery dedicated to pre-Hispanic art.
"O]thers will be the object of investigation and dissemination
by our specialists," says Rocío Fernández, director
of the National Museum, in the statement.
The news arrives at a time
of debate over how museums should handle artifacts acquired
through colonization and conquest. Repatriationdefined
by the Smithsonian's National
Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) as "the process whereby
human remains and certain types of cultural items are returned to
lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations"is
one key option for institutions seeking to return items to their
home countries or cultures.
Javier Fallas, an archaeologist at the National Museum, tells Reuters
that the objects' return is a significant gesture.
He adds, "We don't know why [the Brooklyn Museum] did it, but it's
something very good and atypical in the world."
Isis Davis-Marks is a freelance writer and artist based in New
York City. Her work has also appeared in Artsy, the Columbia Journal,
and elsewhere. Website: isisdavismarks.com
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