Curating Controversy:
The Theodore Roosevelt Statue displayed outside the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City has long been a site of protest. Viewed as a symbol of white supremacy, the Roosevelt Statue depicts the former president high on a horse, literally raised above a Native American and an African. In 2018, a Mayoral Commission reviewed the work and the Mayor decided that the statue was to remain, but additional context was needed. The AMNH created an exhibit entitled Addressing the Statue. Following the 2020 protests regarding systemic racism in the United States, the museum and mayor finally decided to remove the sculpture. This article explores how the creation of AMNH, the creation of the field of anthropology, and Theodore Roosevelt’s life provide context about the statue and why it is associated with white supremacy. A brief overview is also given of the history of protests surrounding it, the Mayoral Commission, and the creation of the Addressing the Statue exhibition. The exhibition was flawed but began a further discussion about the sculpture. However, the 2020 protests confirmed to the museum and mayor that this controversial statue must go. The Roosevelt statue reflects the power of material culture and the visible legacy of white supremacy.
Beaded Soles:
Oftentimes indigenous objects in Western museums are displayed with little to no context, making them seem divorced from the presence of their community. This article engages with the Southern Cheyenne’s Child’s Moccasins on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Art of Native America. By taking a critical approach to the exhibition practices, this article hopes to present a case for the embodiment of community within their display. With specific attention given to a visual analysis of the Child’s Moccasins, as well as a discussion of the generationality behind their creation, the article intends to broadly highlight possible ways of engaging with these objects in the museum space.
Imperialism, Identity, and Image:
This article explores how objects provenanced in once colonized territories carry a history of both its country of origin and its colonizing power. By evaluating the presentations of the Rosetta Stone from Egypt, a wampum belt from the United States, and the Throne of Maharaja Ranjit Singh from Pakistan, all of which are displayed in British institutions, this piece claims that tangible culture can create a necessary cognitive dissonance within their own historical identities. The British hegemony over these objects provides a conundrum for the presentation of their object biographies, namely that their later history in England takes precedence over their original history in their country of origin, reinforcing the identity of Imperial Britain and the power that it once held. The author utilizes theories of Orientalism, museum presentation, and the western conceptualization of heritage and historiography to argue that to create a full object biography of these pieces a complete picture of its full history must be presented, which is necessary for the fuller understanding of the object as it relates both to its place in history and its physical place in the museum.
