Collections lie at the heart of most museums, so naturally, values regarding the ownership and control of collections are central to museum ethics. In 2023, AAM launched the Voluntary Repatriation, Restitution, and Reparations project to explore where these changes may lead us decades hence.
To explore the next horizon of museum practice, AAM invited a diverse array of writers to share their visions for what preferable futures might look like with respect to voluntary repatriation, restitution, and reparations. The resulting collection includes:
- opinion pieces,
- predictions of where current trends and events might lead us in the future,
- and fiction that immerses readers in these possible futures.
By sharing these visions of potential futures, AAM hopes to provide museum people with the inspiration that fuels change and the courage to disrupt any current practice that is no longer fit for its purpose.
Hope in Solidarity: Building Trust Towards Cultural Care and Repair
An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which museums can be part of a process of societal healing by enabling community-led work towards reconciliation and prioritizing listening, cultural care, and epistemological equity.
An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which African heritage conversation and exhibition spaces will be re-baptized as “shrineums” rather than “museums,” with a matching infrastructural reconceptualization based on community cultural sensitivities and epistemic knowledge systems.
Department, Yad Vashem Archive
A Future of Collaboration: Case Studies of Provenance Dilemmas Regarding Jewish Communal Property
An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which a network of individuals and institutions see preservation and accessibility of Jewish textual heritage as a joint responsibility.
The Gallery Has a Dance Floor Now
A speculative fiction piece exploring a future in which right relationships between people, their objects, and the stewards of those objects have been rebuilt and a new kind of museum an emerge.
From Preservation to Reparation: Descendant Engagement and Museums
An opinion piece envisioning a future in which descendants of enslaved communities have an equitable, reparative seat at the table as we strive toward true repair and stronger museums.
A Burdened Past, An Unburdened Future
An opinion piece exploring a future in which everything that was taken grows old and dies where it belongs.
Shalom Hartman Institute
Holocaust Art Restitution Project
Anthropology, Illinois State Museum
A work of speculative fiction exploring a future in which the provenance of an object can be exhibited with a power equal to or exceeding the actual object.
What’s Provenance is Prologue
An opinion piece exploring a future in which museums treat the provenance of an object as equally worthy of storytelling as its creation, especially in the case of looted or stolen works.
Museum as Way Station: Reframing Repositories as Part of Objects Journeys
An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which museums recognize they are but one stop on a cultural object’s journey and returning an object to its community of origin continues its life process.
Associate Curator of Native Hawaiian
History and Culture, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian
Institution
Sharing Digital Heritage: The Case of a Digital Repatriation in the Gwembe Valley of Zambia
An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which digital repatriation can be a means in which African cultural objects in foreign museums are reconnected with their embedded Indigenous knowledge and communities of origin in Africa.
Navigating Museum Currents and Futures: Lessons From Oceania
A future in which museums in Oceania and the people working within them are still here modeling ways in which museums can expand their horizons while learning from our collective past.
The Future of Provenance: Digital Cataloguing as Reparative Practice
An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which provenance records are digitally available, linked across constituents, and shaped by various perspectives.
Intelligent Mischief
Waystation Initiative, UCLA Cotsen
Institute of Archaeology
An Oddity Amongst Antiquities: A Mystery at the Bureau
A work of speculative fiction exploring a future in which descendants of those enslaved in the US and communities in sub-Saharan Africa use the stories, hidden histories and spiritual values of stolen artifacts to reconnect communities that have long been separated by enslavement and colonialism and repair the social and spiritual harm that was caused.
Object Destinies: What Is a Better Future for Materials Culture in Institutional Collections?
An academic foresight paper that reimagines the values and mission of collecting institutions as part of a future in which the ownership of collections of cultural objects is in the hands of the people who created the or their descendants.
Twenty Years of Persistence, Two Hundred Years of Patience
An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which repatriation is completed and we are working collectively to tell the stories of removal, theft, accession, and subsequent restoration and redress.
This project is generously supported by
