Archdiocese of St. Louis’ Post

Museums begin to repatriate Native American display objects in their collections to Native American descendants. Sacred traditions of all cultures give rich meaning to lives past and present. #nativeamerican #sacredspaces #museumeducation #peace #respect #justice "On Jan. 12, federal regulations concerning the exhibition and study of Native American remains and sacred artifacts were tightened, to bring teeth and clarity to a set of rules that languished for decades. The revised regulations are sweeping: They demand museums speed up the process of repatriating Native American “human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony,” establishing ownership and lineage between museum collections and Native American descendants, returning anything requested. Museums must update their inventories of Native American remains and funerary objects within five years. Also, curators can no longer categorize such items as “culturally unidentifiable,” thereby holding them indefinitely. Tribal knowledge and traditions must be deferred to."

The American Museum of Natural History in New York, along with other leading U.S. institutions, is closing major exhibits featuring Native American artifacts due to new federal regulations introduced by the Biden administration. These regulations require museums to gain permission from Native American tribes before displaying cultural items or conducting research on them. This policy change comes in response to historical practices where artifacts were often taken without consent from sacred sites. The museum has closed two specific exhibits: the Hall of the Great Plains and the Eastern Woodlands exhibit, which include items from various tribes such as the Cree, Cheyenne, and Iroquois. This action, effective from Saturday, is part of a broader effort to respect the perspectives and values of Indigenous peoples and to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The act aims to facilitate the return of sacred objects and human remains to their rightful communities. The closures represent a significant shift in how museums manage and display Native American artifacts, affecting nearly five million annual visitors to the American Museum of Natural History alone. These steps also emphasize a move towards healing and reconciliation with Indigenous communities. #NativeAmericanHeritage #MuseumEthics #CulturalRepatriation #IndigenousRights #ArtifactConservation #AmericanMuseumOfNaturalHistory #BidenAdministration #CulturalHeritage

... a very interesting issue for me is the property of artworks, that is a kind of a metaphorical issue... the link between cultural heritage and property is more actual-widespread-prevalent than the middle man can imagine... For the past several years the idea and sometimes implementation of returning art affects to the native home/site (if it still exists) is an ongoing topic of discussion here across the pond in the US as well, apart form Italy https://lnkd.in/d_4_r_J3

[Evolving Post] A “national space” such as a library or a gallery or a museum ideating a narrative for the state might have been vital ingredient in the formation of the state. But these are probably the very institutions from where their next level of evolution would come. The idea of evolution into the next phase of statecraft might appear mind boggling at first - but the processes are already visible with Generative AI in the offing. What shape and what contours the updates would take would be determined by the dialogues that the stakeholders of the state have amongst themselves. That is why inclusivity and demodeacy and rule of law and institutionalism are important frameworks for understanding and for reinforcing. Remember the central library of Trantor ? #Foundation #FutureofRepublics #Strategy #AI #Netnography

In the early modern era, the Italian peninsula was divided into numerous sovereign states, each with its own form of government. Although a unified nation-state – namely, the Regno d’Italia (Kingdom of Italy) – was founded only in 1861, in the Italian language the term nazione had been current since at least the fourteenth century. The first Italian dictionary, the Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca of 1612, listed several occurrences of the word in the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. According to the Vocabolario, it had two separate meanings. On the one hand, nazione could denote ‘birth’ or ‘origin’ as an equivalent to the Latin term ortus or origo. On the other hand, like the Latin word natio, it could refer to people born in the same province or city. According to this definition, a nation was, in early modern Italy, a rather small entity: a community of people from the same place. Rome was filled with around fifty so-called national churches (chiese nazionali). A third of them belonged to nationes from all over Italy, for instance San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, Il Santo Sudario dei Piemontesi, and Santa Croce e San Bonaventura dei Lucchesi (places of worship for people from Florence, Piedmont, and Lucca respectively). Between 1523 and 1978 the papal state was governed only by Italian popes, while the papal court was dominated by cardinals from many different Italian regions who cultivated different ‘national’ identities. The pope also had strong ties to his own hometown or province – a relationship that tended to influence his patronage of the arts as well. The frescoes in the Galleria delle Carte Geografiche, a ‘visual encyclopaedia’ executed in 1580/1581, were commissioned by the Bolognese pope Gregory XIII. The maps on its walls were designed by the cartographer Egnazio Danti, who held a professorship in the pope’s native city. Although one of the maps stages Rome as caput orbis, or ‘capital of the globe’, the pictorial cycle does not aim to represent the world as it was known at that time. Instead, it focuses entirely on the Italian peninsula, a topographical entity governed by many different rulers. The aim of this volume is to take a closer look at the function of museums in the process of nation-building. As spaces of knowledge, national museums and galleries played an important role in conveying a national identity in nineteenth-century Europe, though the individual institutions differed in their precise function, in the orientation of their collections, and in their didactic approach. This volume examines the potential of such spaces to contribute to the formation and education of the nascent nation- states encompassing Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland, 280p 2024 transcript Verlag https://lnkd.in/g-YEmZWc

With new rules and new roles, museums are hoping to avoid the cost and reputational harm of repatriation. Older objects, particularly antiquities and archaeological or ethnographic items, increasingly have been the subject of claims and lawsuits by foreign governments and Native American tribes demanding pieces be returned to them, particularly those they assert were taken via looting, art and antiquities theft or just without permission. Are the 300+ pre-Columbian objects recently accessioned by the San Antonio Museum of Art in these two collections a boon… or a headache waiting to happen? Read more: https://lnkd.in/eAss3i2R

🎉 Notices in use: Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields Newfields a Place for Nature & The Arts is using Open to Collaborate, Attribution Incomplete, BC, and TK Notices in its online collections portal. The Notices have been added to items within the African, South Pacific, and Native Arts of the Americas collections at Newfields, which is Local Contexts’ first Founding Supporter and also a Subscriber. Newfields integrated the Notices as part of the overhaul of their online collections portal, which is within KE-EMu. These updates to their technical infrastructure and existing systems also allow for the possibilities of Labels to be added in the future. According to the collections portal Local Contexts Provenance Research page (link below), Newfields is using the Notices “to work towards consultations with Indigenous communities to better understand and respectfully care for and improve our stewardship of these collections while grounding Indigenous rights.” Within the record, the Notices are below any photos and basic identifying information and above the more detailed artwork metadata. The content disclaimer and usage rights on each item also includes that some artworks may have Labels or Notices, which attribute cultural authority. See the Newfields Notices in use here: https://lnkd.in/e_bqn8-R To learn more about our Founding Supporter program, see our June press release: https://lnkd.in/eSm8ena6 #Indigenous #IndigenousRights #Newfields #Museums

Through my studies, professional and personal experiences I have arrived to conclusion that due to the vital importance identity has to human nature, I do consider the human as an ‘animal identitarium’, which means that his outstanding attribute and essence is a striving for identity. Humankind, different from other animals which apparently are satisfied with their one nature and identity, is in constant and anxious research and construction of his or her own identity. The ‘animal identitarium’ creates his or her identity through symbols, rituals, myths which became their own marks of identity; they protect it, and can even kill in the name of identity. Therefore, their identitarian symbols, rituals, and myths form an existential revered environment and territory: his interpretative paradigm, her language and grammar, their ‘real’ world, are sacred to them, providing meaning to life, a sense of belonging. Through these cultural creations their identity is acknowledged.   Ercolani, G., The Maidan Museum: Preserving the Spirit of Maidan - Art, Identity, and the Revolution of Dignity (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2023), 45.

In the latest few posts here, we have just glanced at an artistic evolution from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and then to an early modern age, with particular reference to central Italy. Now, we can dare to anticipate, and meanwhile leave pending, some deductions/conclusions. This transformation was relatively, but surprisingly rapid. During the same transition, art was still essentially or formally sacred. It was affected by religious and cultural influences apparently extraneous to art in itself, notably that of Franciscanism. However, from an art history point of view, ours is usually and deservedly but a little too focused on Florence, and on Giotto, in the transition to the Renaissance. Exploring elsewhere may be useful, interesting or pleasant. Let's limit ourselves to the rest of Tuscany, and to one of the most frequent evangelical subjects at the time, the “Annunciation” of an angel to a young St. Mary. After all, the theme of the announcement of a new era, somehow a rebirth – that is, “renaissance” –, may not have been a completely fortuitous coincidence. Below, two exemplary late Gothic masterpieces in this field, the former better and the latter lesser known. Upper: tempera on wood altarpiece, by the Sienese Simone Martini and his brother-in-law Lippo Memmi (central panel: Uffizi Gallery, Florence; 1333). Lower: a fresco by Spinello Aretino, from the Church of S. Lorenzo, Arezzo (local Diocesan Museum of Sacred Art; ca. 1370-85). In both cases the emotional relationship between the announcer and the Virgin Annunciate, or the pregnancy of the implicit message, look so intense, that in such a sense they will not be surpassed even in Renaissance or Baroque times.