The Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) has formed a new institutional partnership with the Ethiopian Heritage Authority (EHA), which will see five objects from a private collection returned to Ethiopia.
Bob McCarthy, a collector focused on medieval art, approached the TMA about donating some objects so they could be returned to their rightful homes. However, the objects had no provenance documents, so determining their custodians proved complicated. The professional guidelines for such objects are murky. The first piece of legislation on the matter was the Unesco 1970 Convention against “illicit acquisition of cultural properties”. The 30-year review of the resolution in 2000 significantly strengthened its enforcement, but in the gap between 1970 and 2000, the black market for antiquities ballooned. In 2008, the American Alliance of Museums officially adopted the 1970 Convention resolution as an institutional best practice and the conversation around antiquities began to shift toward doing more diligent provenance research.
“It’s left this donut hole where you end up with this retroactive assigning of a best practice,” says Adam M. Levine, the TMA’s director and chief executive. “Literally millions of works of art have been collected in good faith but not the standard between 1970 and 2008, and this is the position Bob McCarthy found himself in.”
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