Upcoming Events

AIA Local Lecture:    Orphaned Antiquities & Cold Case Files:   Investigating Provenance in the New Era of Museum Restitution

Speaker:   Daniel Healey, Provenance Research Specialist at the Worcester Art Museum

Time and Date:   6:30-7:30pm Monday, February 9

Location:  Rehm Library, College of the Holy Cross (location; parking)

About:  Provenance refers to an artwork’s history of ownership, from the time of its creation or archaeological discovery to the present. Provenance researchers track down a wide range of sources—scholarship, auction catalogs, financial records, inventories, correspondence, photographs, markings on artworks themselves, and more—to reconstruct an object’s past and retrace its path to the museum. This work has been compared to that of an investigator, and provenance researchers routinely described as “art detectives.” Over the past decade, these metaphors have become increasingly relevant as law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. have arrested dealers, seized antiquities from the nation’s leading museums, and made hundreds of repatriations to countries around the world—all to great fanfare and press coverage. The collision between the worlds of law enforcement and museums has revolutionized the field of provenance research and redefined the standards of ethical and legal collecting in this country. As a former Antiquities Trafficking Analyst for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and now the Provenance Research Specialist at the Worcester Art Museum, I will share stories from the frontlines of provenance research—stories of looting, forgery, and repatriation—that explain why museums need “art detectives” now more than ever.

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AIA Local Lecture:    Disability and the Greek Ideal:  A Case Study in Marble 

Speaker:   Dr. Debby Sneed, Assistant Professor of Classics at California State University, Long Beach 

Time and Date:   6:30-7:30pm Thursday, March 12

Location:  Hogan 401, Hogan Campus Center, College of the Holy Cross (location; parking)

About:  The study of Greek art is heavily influenced by the notion of the ideal and idealized human body, which has long been assumed to exclude aspects of bodily difference and disability. In this talk, I consider a collection of 6th century BCE sculptures of maidens (korai) that were found on the Athenian Acropolis. As traditionally interpreted, these statues all stood together as representations of the feminine ideal in Greek art, but scholars tend to separate one maiden from her sisters because her body does not fit into modern definitions of beauty. By returning her to her rightful place in this collection, I present a reassessment of Greek sculptural ideals and, with it, of our understandings of Greek art, display, and dedication in late 6th century BCE Athens. 

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