One way to define cultural property is as objects with so powerful a connection to a community that they continue to influence that community’s dreams, hopes, and self-definitions even after the physical objects themselves have disappeared. Our world today presents many examples of such disappearances, whether via theft, unauthorized sale, or even deliberate destruction. The show will focus on what happens after the disappearance – how artists and scholars express their love and need for the vanished objects through the creation of artworks that react to or refer to the objects, through the painstaking reconstruction of the objects, or through fights to repatriate objects taken from one culture and tantalizingly displayed, out of reach, in another country.
The exhibition will run from December 9, 2015, to February 9, 2016, and will be accompanied by a symposium on a date to be determined. The exhibition will be held in the state-of-the-art Shiva Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), a publically accessible gallery in the heart of Manhattan.
If you know of artists whose work addresses missing cultural heritage or scholars or others who are attempting to reconstruct or digitally preserve cultural heritage who might be interested in participating in the exhibit or symposium, please let me know at ethompson@jjay.cuny.edu.