Museums provide an invaluable service by educating the public on the arts and cultures of the world, yet the artifacts collected and exhibited may have been removed illicitly from their native countries.
“Stealing the Past? Collectors and Museums in the 21st Century” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. March 15 in the Center for Visual Arts Haigh Auditorium on The Toledo Museum of Art Campus. The lecture will be presented by Richard M. Leventhal, director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and curator in the American section at the Penn Museum.
In the free, public lecture, Leventhal will talk about the need to prevent the looting of global heritage resources and the acquisition policies of museums — two of the main focuses of his professional activities.
Leventhal also focuses on the preservation of cultural heritage and cultural sites and has worked with law enforcement agencies internationally to stop the illegal movement
of antiquities.
He will illustrate his talk with examples from his own work and several recent cases covered in the media. For more than 30 years, the archaeologist conducted field research in Central America and Mexico, and has written about the ancient Maya.
The event is sponsored by the Toledo Society of the Archaeological Institute of America,
with financial support from the Kurt T. Luckner Lecture Fund and the UT Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
For more information, contact Lea McChesney of the UT Department of Sociology and Anthropology at lea.mcchesney@utoledo.edu.
