When the Nashville Scene held its first annual “You Are So Nashville If” contest in 1989, the winning entry read, “You think our Parthenon is better because the other one fell apart.”
The winners of the news weekly’s long-running contest unfailingly distill the zeitgeist of the city, but I still think about this one every time I pass the Parthenon. It winks at the absurdity of finding an exact, full-size replica of an ancient Athenian temple in a Nashville city park while simultaneously acknowledging the breathtaking grandeur of the building.
By the mid-19th century, Nashville had come to be known as the Athens of the South, a reference to the city’s uncommonly high number of colleges and universities. The real Parthenon was built in the fifth century B.C. as a temple to Athena, the patron goddess of Athens. Our Parthenon was built in 1897 as a temporary exhibition space in connection with Tennessee’s centennial celebration.
It is now a museum and still stands in Centennial Park, surrounded by 132 acres of gardens and other public spaces. Like the original Parthenon, Nashville’s Parthenon tells the world something about how the city sees itself, how it hopes to be understood, the truths it values most.
In keeping with that tradition, officials at Nashville’s Parthenon have just announced that the museum will be returning its collection of pre-Columbian artifacts to Mexico. This decision by a tiny local museum offers an illustration of the practical, moral and ethical issues that much larger museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum in London, are wrestling with as they consider what to do about the works in their collections that were looted from other cultures.
The 248 pre-Columbian works came to the Parthenon by way of donations from two private collectors during the 1960s and ’70s. The artifacts include tools, musical instruments, ceramic pots, effigies and animal sculptures (including one very charming Mexican hairless dog).
A representative sampling has been on public display since April 18 in an exhibition titled “Repatriation and Its Impact.” After the show closes on July 14, the entire collection will be delivered to the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.
I walked through the exhibition with Bonnie Seymour, an assistant curator who joined the museum staff two years ago. The necessity of addressing the ethical implications of this collection became clear on her very first day in the new job. She recalls pausing at the pre-Columbian antiquities while touring the museum’s art in storage and thinking, “Well, this is not where they should be.”
With artworks collected before the ethical standards followed by today’s collectors existed, the question of where antiquities belong is often charged. “Each case of repatriation is different,” Ms. Seymour takes care to point out.
When a work’s provenance isn’t clear, or when documentation of its legal purchase is missing, or when it is beloved by museum visitors, or when the decision is politically fraught, or when the work has cultural significance far beyond the place of origin, or when the museum has been prevented by local law from repatriating the work — all of these circumstances, and others, can make what might seem like a straightforward question far more complicated.
For quite a few of these reasons, the British Museum is grappling with the question of what to do about a group of friezes and life-size statues, long referred to as the Elgin Marbles, that were removed from the Athenian Parthenon in the late 18th and early 19th centuries at the behest of Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin. Athens was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, and the earl served as Britain’s ambassador to it. By then, the ancient Parthenon had been severely damaged by wars.
As Rebecca Mead wrote in a detailed piece for The New Yorker, the ambassador helped himself to the Parthenon Sculptures, as they are now called, with the tacit permission of Turkish authorities. In 1816, he sold the sculptures to the British Museum. Soon after Greece gained its independence, it started asking for the Parthenon Sculptures to be returned. It’s been asking ever since.
The question of repatriating the pre-Columbian artifacts, by contrast, was much easier for officials at Nashville’s Parthenon to decide. Many of the antiquities were known to have been excavated without the permission of Mexican officials. They were unrelated to the museum’s actual mission. They were not on display and had no sentimental value to Nashvillians. The museum’s ethical obligation to these artworks made by the people of another culture, and to the people whose history they emerged from, was clear and uncomplicated by political exigencies.
The Parthenon’s director, Lauren Bufferd, and the Metro Parks and Recreation director, Monique Horton Odom, immediately supported Ms. Seymour’s instinctive reaction: These artifacts do not belong here. They belong to the people of Mexico, whose history they share and can help to illuminate.
But first Ms. Seymour had to research the provenance of each piece. An appropriate museum in Mexico had to agree to accept the donation. The Mexican consulate in Atlanta had to be consulted. Procedural roadblocks required the help of metropolitan Nashville’s legal counsel to resolve. The Metropolitan Council, Nashville’s legislative body, had to pass an ordinance permitting the Parthenon to de-accession the pre-Columbian collection and allow the repatriation to proceed. The story unfolded in a way that should make every Nashvillian proud.
The bilingual exhibition itself is far more than a final display of artifacts that will soon be going home. It is also a crash course in the complexities of de-accessioning artifacts and repatriating them with the cultures that created them.
Colorful graphics explain the historical context of art “collection” in earlier eras, recent examples of repatriation undertaken by other museums and the role of replicas in replacing original works for use in education programs.
The exhibition also includes artworks by José Vera González, a Nashville-based artist from the region where these works were excavated. His multimedia creations visually and viscerally illustrate the links between contemporary artists and their own cultural history. The exhibition occupies one small gallery, but it conveys an entire world.
Nashville’s Parthenon was restored and rebuilt as a permanent structure during the early 20th century. Restored again in the 1990s, it now houses a glorious gold-clad statue of Athena that stands 42 feet tall, a full-size replica of the statue that was once the centerpiece of the Athenian Parthenon. The original Athena, carved by the sculptor Phidias, is lost to history. Ours was constructed by a Nashville sculptor, Alan LeQuire. Like the figures in the building’s pediments, many of which are now lost or damaged in the Greek original, Mr. LeQuire’s Athena was fashioned after painstaking research. The closest you can come to seeing the ancient Athenian Parthenon untouched by time is to come to Nashville.
It’s not true that our Parthenon is better because the other one fell apart, of course, but it is a powerful if unlikely argument for returning artworks to the cultures that created them. There are many ways to learn about the creativity of earlier cultures that do not include theft or economic coercion.
In returning its entire pre-Columbian collection to Mexico, the curatorial team at Nashville’s Parthenon, with the help of a huge number of other people in Nashville’s government, has quietly demonstrated an undeniable truth: If something isn’t truly yours, you need to give it back.
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