Steve and Katie speak with their colleague and return guest Tom Kline and special guest Victoria Reed, the renowned Provenance Curator at the MFA Boston, about the status of provenance research and ownership review at US museums and also the first of its kind agreement between MFA Boston and the descendants of enslaved potter David Drake (aka Dave the Potter) resolving the ownership of two of Drake’s monumental stoneware vessels.
Resources
https://www.mfa.org/press-release/david-drake-ownership-resolution
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/us/mfa-boston-david-drake-pottery.html
https://www.mfa.org/exhibition/hear-me-now-the-black-potters-of-old-edgefield-south-carolina
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/arts/design/victoria-reed-museum-of-fine-arts-stolen-artwork.html
https://www.schlaw.com/#/about/thomas-r-kline
Katie and Steve discuss topics based on news and magazine articles and court filings and not based on original research unless specifically noted.
Episode Transcription
Steve Schindler: Hi, I’m Steve Schindler.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I’m Katie Wilson-Milne.
Steve Schindler: Welcome to the Art Law Podcast, a monthly podcast exploring the places where art intersects with and interferes with the law.
Katie Wilson-Milne: The Art Law Podcast is sponsored by the law firm of Schindler Cohen and Hochman LLP, a premier litigation and art law boutique in New York City.
Steve Schindler: Hi, Katie.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Hi, Steve. How are you?
Steve Schindler: Oh, I’m doing just fine. I’m excited about today’s podcast.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Me, too. We’ve been doing this so long that it’s rare to have a completely new topic, but-
Steve Schindler: I know, but I think we’ve got one.
Katie Wilson-Milne: In part, we really have one today.
Steve Schindler: Yeah. Well, so we are thrilled to be joining today by Victoria Reed, who is the Bettina Burr Chair for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Victoria, or as her friends- and I think we will call her- Torie, received her Ph.D. in Art history from Rutgers University and has been conducting provenance research in art museums for over 20 years. In her current position at MFA Boston, she oversees provenance research and documentation, responds to ownership claims, and coordinates and implements due diligence policies and practices for the museum. Her scholarly interests include the collecting histories of stolen artwork, particularly looted art that came to America after World War II, the development of museum ethics in the US, and– I love this one– the iconography of decapitation in medieval and early modern Europe. I’ve never met anyone with that scholarly interest.
Katie Wilson-Milne: It’s like which one doesn’t belong with the others.
Steve Schindler: I know. Well-
Katie Wilson-Milne: Or maybe they do all belong. I have to think about it.
Steve Schindler: We’re also happy to be joined today by our colleague, Tom Kline. Everyone knows Tom, but for those who don’t, Tom is of counsel to the very well-known art and litigation boutique firm of Schindler Cohen and Hochman. Tom has a long resume of his accomplishments, particularly around restitution of Nazi-looted art, cultural property, and now, increasingly, restitution of art removed from countries under colonial occupation. Tom represented MFA Boston and worked with Torie on an historic restitution of two ceramic works created by David Drake, an enslaved person and potter who lived in South Carolina to his descendants. So we are delighted to welcome Torie and Tom to talk about what Torie does and this historic event.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I guess what we’d like to start, Torie, by hearing a little bit more about what you do at the MFA and just to put in context for our listeners what it means to be a provenance researcher and what it means for a museum to be doing that kind of work proactively.
Victoria Reed: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on. I have been at the MFA for, let’s see, I started in 2003, so now we’re in 2026, so it’s been almost 23 years and my job has really, I would say, evolved over that time. When I started, I was in the Art of Europe department and I was really working on Nazi-era provenance research. At that point, a lot of it was just making sure that our documentation was correct and in order getting information online and responding to ownership claims as they came in. The job evolved in such a way that in 2010, the MFA centralized the provenance research role. So I began working with every curatorial department in the museum. We’re an encyclopedic museum. We collect very broadly. The point of this was to ensure that our curatorial departments were upholding a consistent standard. In other words, we’re not asking one department to uphold one standard and another department to uphold another, because that’s not responsible collections management. Since 2010, I’ve been working with all the curatorial departments on looking at incoming acquisitions, potential acquisitions to make sure that we’re asking the right questions and that we are responsibly verifying the answers we get to those questions. I look at incoming loans. I still research and help respond to ownership claims, as well as ongoing research of the permanent collection. Responding to inquiries, updating records, really anything having to do with the history of ownership lands on my desk. The position is still centralized. Now, actually its own department, which is wonderful. That is in a nutshell what I do.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And how did you get into this field?
Victoria Reed: Well, I always say I got into it by accident, because provenance research wasn’t really a field when I started doing this. As you mentioned in the intro, I got my PhD at Rutgers and knew that I wanted to work in museums, but I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I worked at the Met when I was in grad school, which was a fantastic experience. I worked as a research assistant. I worked doing gallery talks for the education department. My first full-time job was at the Princeton University Art Museum, and I was there for two years, from 2001 to 2003. They had just settled a restitution claim and really felt that it was time to be more systematic about going through the European collection. I got my feet wet doing that and going through the collection and getting records online. I mean, remember back in 2001, not every museum had a robust website or a robust web presence. And so a lot of what I was doing was helping to get records out into the public. So as my time at Princeton started to draw to a close, I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know if I was going to stay in museums. I didn’t know if I was going to stay in New Jersey, but the job at Boston opened up. And I applied and was very fortunate to be hired. So I started in the summer of 2003, but it was never anything that I expected to do. It was never anything that I was led to believe there was a future in. And yet here we are, 23 years later.
Steve Schindler: Wow, that’s really, that’s kind of an incredible journey. Tell me a little bit just in terms of the scale of what you do, how many works are in the sort of permanent collection of MFA Boston? What are we talking about?
Victoria Reed: We are talking about 500,000 objects at the MFA Boston. So it’s a pretty big collection.
Steve Schindler: Right. And so how, like sort of strategically, do you think about where to start? I mean, obviously, if you have a complaint or somebody makes a claim, that’s one thing, but in terms of just sort of the ongoing provenance research that you do, how do you think about where to start in a collection of 500,000 works?
Victoria Reed: Yes. Well, it’s very difficult to be systematic, particularly at this point. I think it’s difficult to be systematic with a collection of this size. So at this point, while I do review the provenance of the permanent collection, it is usually when things are, for example, going out on loan or when we are reinstalling a gallery, or if there’s a publication and there’s a sort of discrete group of objects that may be receiving renewed attention or that are crossing our threshold, that’s always a good time to check our records. I think for most objects in the collection, we already have some provenance information already. So it is often a matter of checking it and verifying it, seeing if there are new resources out there, can we correct it, are there mistakes, and augmenting our records. I say, check early, check often.
Tom Kline: We’re going to have to be mindful of how modest Torie is, and I think your career has been augmented with some significant writings and some speaking opportunities on panels and elsewhere. Can you just talk a little bit about how that relates to your position at the MFA?
Victoria Reed: Good question. Well, I guess when my position became centralized, I began to think of my role a little bit, not quite as an ambassador, but basically I communicate with our curators, and I communicate with our staff, and I communicate with our board and our collections committee. But I also have a responsibility to share our research findings with the public, and that helps us to fulfill our role as an educational institution. Whether we’ve made a decision about an acquisition, or a deaccession, or a restitution settlement, people in the public realm are going, some people are going to agree with what we do, some people are not going to agree with what we do. I see my role as being someone who can explain the why. Not whether or not you like it, not whether or not you agree, but this was the rationale, this was the thinking behind our decision-making. I speak to students, I do give public lectures, and I have tried to publish on our ownership resolutions, particularly if there’s original research, because I think these things can only help other researchers who may find themselves in a similar situation.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Torie, as you just mentioned, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of objects in the MFA collection.
Steve Schindler: 500,000.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Hundreds of thousands of objects. And because it’s sort of, you know, in some ways a typical encyclopedic collection, these objects are incredibly varied from different periods and different styles, and some were made to be fine arts, some were not, and I’m wondering in the context of a museum like that, how you think about the obviously very different types of provenance issues that come up with those different types of objects. So obviously, one big category is going to be the artwork that was eluded, targeted, displaced during World War II. But there’s many other types of ownership questions, and we’re going to talk about one novel one today in the case of enslaved African-Americans. But maybe you could just give us some more examples with a collection that broad and varied.
Victoria Reed: Sure. I mean, I think really what we are looking for- there’s a lot of reasons to do provenance research, but one of the most urgent ones is that we are looking for instances of historical theft or dispossession. I think that I’ve come up with a list of different theft categories. They’re not comprehensive. That’s my caveat, but I think there’s different ways.
Katie Wilson-Milne: There could be more, right?
Victoria Reed: There could be more. There probably are more, but there are different ways that art was lost to people. We have dealt with claims of straightforward theft, objects that have gone missing from other museums, cultural institutions, or people’s homes. That’s perhaps the most straightforward one. We are looking for instances of archaeological looting. I think when we talk about Nazi-era looting, very often what we are really talking about is expropriation, state expropriation, where the government takes private property and nationalizes it. There is artwork taken during periods of conflict, which I think is a sort of overlapping but separate category. And then the sort of broadest category and one that we’re really grappling with today is that of artwork that was either sold under duress or otherwise coercively transferred in some way. That often comes up during the period of the Holocaust, but it also comes up under periods of colonialism. It also comes up under periods of settler colonialism here in the United States. Many indigenous tribes lost their cultural heritage that way. These are the five categories that I’ve come up with. I think they represent the biggest problems that we are keeping an eye out for in the collection.
Katie Wilson-Milne: In some ways, we’ve gotten much better about several of those categories in terms of ethical norms, whether they’re always followed or not, I think, but sort of a broad understanding of looking at the merits of actual theft or dispossession. But it’s that last category, sales under duress, that’s still in the World War II context remains the absolute trickiest, both for the law and I think ethically to understand. Obviously, we talked on this podcast about the incredibly wealthy European families who were able to sell artworks to escape and obviously did that willingly, but would not have done it if they didn’t need to get out of Germany or Austria or wherever else they were leaving. And it’s interesting that category seems to cross all these different historical contexts. That’s colonialism, slavery. You mentioned the European encounters with Native American cultural history. So I wonder, do you see that as the frontier of ethical provenance research and action?
Victoria Reed: It’s a good question. I mean, what I can say is that it is the most difficult to research, because what you’re asked to reconstruct is not only where an object has been, but the circumstances under which it changed hands and how much duress someone was under at the time. And that can be very tricky when there’s no paper trail or where you have very few data points and you have to go beyond just tracing the provenance of the work of art to really looking at historical records, banking records, all kinds of things that as someone who was trained in Renaissance art, I never thought that I would have to become familiar with. I mean, you really haven’t lived until you’ve read about the German banking crisis in German. I have zero training in economics.
Steve Schindler: Yeah. I haven’t lived, I’ll tell you that.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I’ll leave that to you. I just see that as so tricky, because it’s, I mean, you’re asked to be a historian, but you’re also asked to make real assessments about the politics and power relationships in any given place at a given time, which is contested, right? I mean, and varied. The colonial experience was not the same in every country.
Victoria Reed: Not at all. And I think even when you’re talking about Holocaust-era claims or colonial-era claims, two people can look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions. And so my job is not, I’m not the exclusive arbiter of whether the Museum of Fine Arts Boston honors a restitution claim or not. That’s up to our board as recommended by my group of staff, including the director. But my job is really to present the research so that a responsible decision can be made.
Steve Schindler: And I think it just seems to me, too, that at least when you look at some of the Nazi-era looting, one of the things the Nazis were famous for was their compulsion for writing things down and keeping records. And so there’s a lot more documentation to go on. But then I just imagine when you’re looking at some of these colonial repatriation issues, there may not be that kind of record keeping. So you have to try to piece it together in a different way.
Victoria Reed: Yes, and these are also objects that were sort of treated differently by European collectors, and they would have been catalogued in a different way. You might not have an artist’s name. Just by their very nature, they are going to be more difficult to trace.
Tom Kline: I would also add that the Nazi keeping of records is a little bit of a cliche. And so if you have a Nazi case where there are no records, which is very common, then you encounter the response, well, where are the records? They- thought they were great record keepers. But for lesser works, works on paper, anything other than European painting, they aren’t necessarily well-documented.
Steve Schindler: Good point, yeah.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right.
Victoria Reed: Right. Or when we’re talking about duress sales, duress transactions, these may be between private parties who didn’t want to write things down and didn’t want to keep a record, because it was illegal or they didn’t want to report the income. And so there may have been a deliberate destruction of the records.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Well, what comes up in these duress cases- again, our model is the World War II context- is sometimes there is paperwork and it looks like a regular sale. And that’s what’s really tough because then you get dueling storyes about what was kind of behind the documentation. The documentation looks: family sells artwork to gallery for price they agree on. There’s an invoice. That’s it. But, you know, at least one side is saying that the story is much deeper than that and it’s not reflected in the records, you know. And that’s also really hard. The records in a lot of cases, you know, may not be satisfactory to tell the ethical story at least.
Victoria Reed: Right.
Tom Kline: I was thinking of the paper you wrote about the Wacker-Bondy warehouse in Paris, which was the location for numerous artworks and was heavily, heavily looted by the Nazis during the occupation period. I litigated a case involving a work that came out of there with no documentation, and we were able to do a certain amount of research. But then when you came along, you weren’t limited by what we could get by subpoena, and you weren’t limited by the time periods of litigation. So the claim I was handling was resolved on some fraction of the historical record, and you did an exhaustive study of what happened to the works at that warehouse, which really helps other people who want to know about it.
Victoria Reed: Yes. And I was also doing this research, as you say, at a different time. I think you’re talking about one of the very first Nazi-era claim cases. And I was doing my research in a sort of post-digital world, where many of these records are easily accessible. And provenance researchers have learned so much more about how to do this work and where to find the records than they did in the 1990s, when we were all just getting started. So I mean, I think the field as a whole has grown tremendously since the 90s. I think we didn’t know what we didn’t know when we started off doing this work. How long is it going to take? What are the red flags we’re looking for? I think we have a much better sense of that now.
Steve Schindler: And are your colleagues at other museums, do you cooperate with each other? Is there a sort of a exchange of information back and forth that is helpful?
Victoria Reed: There can be. There can be if two researchers are working on the same claim or a similar claim. I think most provenance researchers at this point know each other and were pretty friendly and are happy to share documentation. For the most part though, because of the nature of the work at being somewhat sensitive, it’s rather solitary work.
Katie Wilson-Milne: It’s sensitive because- this is, I think, sort of self-explanatory- but it’s sensitive, because you’re researching whether your own institution has proper ownership of something. And if it does or doesn’t, you don’t want to prematurely be exposing information that could lead to a different conclusion.
Victoria Reed: That’s right. And we don’t want to put anything down on paper or on email either, right, that could get forwarded or end up being disclosed inadvertently. And a lot of this information is sensitive, or we might be working with private collectors. We might be working on objects that are coming to us but are not yet ours. And so a certain level of discretion is definitely needed.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So you get a provenance inquiry or claim. You know, what do you do? I mean, take us through your process in a little more detail.
Victoria Reed: So I think every provenance research process, you have to start specific and small and become increasingly broad as you go. And so I think the first thing that I would want to do with any claim is track down all of the paperwork that we have internally for this object. Any acquisition paperwork, any loan paperwork, any shipping paperwork, anything from the time this object came in, I want to construct as comprehensive an exhibition history and bibliography as possible. Is there anything that’s been published about this work of art that we don’t have in our files already? Is there more information out there that we can find? That’s really step one. And you do have to know the object. You have to know are there marks? Has the painting been altered over time? You have to understand the condition for various reasons. One thing that I try to do is to create a timeline. Every time I go, I just open a word document and start putting in the facts. You don’t start by doing an assessment or by making judgments about the facts, but you want to record the fact as they happened. So in other words, like 1934, a painting was exhibited at X gallery in Paris. 1935, X gallery closes, or whatever. I mean, I’m making this up, but the point is you want to sort of lay out everything. And only when you lay out the facts, can you, I think, process it and make a better determination. So it really also depends on what questions you’re trying to answer. And I think different objects pose different questions to you at the beginning of the research process. So for some objects, the process of doing provenance research, whether or not there is a claim, the questions you’re trying to answer may be very simple. You know, did the artist consign this in 1956 or 1958? I mean, that’s a fairly- it sounds inconsequential, you never know. But for other questions, you know, was this work sold under duress as a result of the Holocaust is a much more complicated question.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Well, yeah.
Victoria Reed: So, you know, different, you open different files, you have different levels of information already, and that’s going to help determine your research path.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Do you have to travel to look through archives at different institutions? Is everything digitized? I mean, obviously, you’re looking, as you said, you start internally, but then you look at records far outside the MFA zone.
Victoria Reed: I would say in many claim situations, particularly Nazi-era claim situations, the records are often held elsewhere, and it is certainly not true that everything has been digitized. And while archives are being digitized, and that’s wonderful, I still think it is important to know how to use a physical archive. It’s very easy, and we all do it. Go online and do the keyword search, and you think you get exactly what you need. Never mind human error, and some things might not be transcribed correctly. But I do think it’s important to know how to go to an archive and understand the context from which any given document comes, because it’s in an archive in a particular way for a reason. And so balancing the digital with the physical archives is always probably sound research practice, but it’s also necessary, because not everything is online.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Is that what you do? Do you go, as a matter of course, do you go look at physical archives when you’re researching a claim?
Victoria Reed: It depends. If they’ve been digitized, most archives strongly prefer that you use the digitized version. I think that my point is simply that you can’t just pull up one document by doing that keyword search and be done. You have to look at, if the file has been digitized, understand what that file is, understand why it’s there, how it fits into the archival holdings, rather than doing the quick Google approach to archival searching.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right.
Steve Schindler: Do you work with a team when you’re doing this, or is it just you, or do you have colleagues as the museum who work with you?
Victoria Reed: Well, of course, I work with many people at the museum, but in the Provenance Research Department, presently, I’m the only staff member. I do have right now three really wonderful graduate interns, but they’re going to be moving on at the end of the spring. So at the moment, it’s just me. In the past, I’ve worked with a research associate.
Steve Schindler: So I assume at some point, when you’re dealing with a claim, as opposed to just your sort of overall research, it might come attached to a lawyer.
Victoria Reed: Yes, it might.
Steve Schindler: So do you think about that, and do you think about, say, when you would call a lawyer for the museum, say Tom, for example, what are the circumstances that might cause you to do that?
Victoria Reed: Yeah. So we don’t have in-house counsel. I’m delighted to be able to work with Tom, and so we would certainly work with him on any kind of legal paperwork that would need to be drawn up. So at a minimum, at the very end of the claim process, when we are coming up with a restitution agreement or a settlement agreement, that’s the kind of thing that really needs to be done by a lawyer. In other cases, it kind of depends. Many claims are resolved really without, I don’t know if I should say this to three lawyers, but without the help of lawyers, I mean, they can be resolved very amicably between the museum and the claimant. There might be other times where if a lawyer is particularly aggressive, or I feel like this is really not within my realm of expertise, then we would ask someone like Tom to handle the correspondence in the back and forth.
Katie Wilson-Milne: You don’t get the claim personally and then in isolation at the museum research. You’re in touch with some decision-makers at the museum or curators or- I imagine.
Victoria Reed: Right. So very often claims do get forwarded to me, but we would need to inform the curators at the start, whoever is responsible for the object, and my colleagues in the administration. So people who are overseeing the curatorial division and the director and they might be involved.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So it seems like this maybe, this happens in two parts. You research the object, the history of the object, its chain of title, the geopolitical circumstances around those title transfers perhaps. But then you need to actually figure out who to give it back to if there was a problem. If you find there’s no title issues, you don’t give it back, doesn’t matter who’s asking for it. But if someone’s asking for it or some group of people or some country, we’re talking about repatriation, then the question is, is this the right party to return it to, whether or not there was a problem in the title? And it’s fascinated me, that’s its own complex question. Definitely in the case of repatriation, because national borders change, the makers of objects can be from diverse ethical groups within a nation-state that do not align and agree that they are the same. And even in the case of World War II, figuring out who the heirs actually are, it’s just not enough for someone to say, I am the heir of this person.
Victoria Reed: Right. And that’s also the kind of thing that I might pull Tom in to make sure that we have the correct documentation. And yeah, or that there could be competing claims from different groups, not just that you’re dealing with the entirety of heirs, but some of these works of art that changed hands during the Nazi-era might have been stolen in three or four different ways within a very short period of time, so that can become complicated. And if we are really unsure, in other words, if we have indications of some kind of theft or looting, but we really don’t know where the object should go, we do feature it online. So we have several pages dedicated to provenance research on our website. And we have a page dedicated to Nazi-era provenance research. We have a page dedicated to antiquities and archaeological material. And we have a page dedicated to colonial or provenance. And on each of those pages, we have a short list of objects that have specific red flags in the provenance. They’re fairly short lists. But on, for example, the antiquities and archaeological material page, we have, I believe, three objects that the museum acquired. And in doing research, we’re going back through the paperwork, through the files, it was clear that something was not quite right. And we have indications that perhaps some of the provenance might have been falsified. In which case, the falsification is covering something up. What is it covering up? Well, if it’s not authenticity, it could very well be an ownership issue. But the problem with many ancient materials, particularly from the ancient Roman world, is that they could have come from any one of a number of modern nation states. And so that’s the kind of situation where you’re like, well, there’s definitely some red flags here that we would want to probe further, but we don’t know where this came from. It could have come from almost anywhere in the Roman Empire. So it’s not an ideal situation to be in, of course. What is the best solution in that case? All we can do is feature the object online, and should it go into the galleries, make sure that we’re very clear on the labels that the object doesn’t have a clear provenance and that we do see some red flags there.
Steve Schindler: And does anyone or any country come forward to make a claim based on your posting of this information? Has that ever happened?
Victoria Reed: It has happened with Nazi-era provenance. It has not happened with archaeological materials. However, the archaeological materials web page is relatively new compared to our Nazi-era web page, which has been up since before I started at the MFA.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Tom, how do you think about that question of, let’s say you do identify a problem, but then how do you verify who you return it to? Because you can imagine a situation where one of many zealous countries, you know, nation states and their current form make a claim, but you might not feel comfortable that that’s the sole claimant, given, you know, the mismatch of historical and modern nationalism and boundaries.
Tom Kline: And also given the shortage of evidence in these archaeological cases, we did have the Sevso Silver case, where there were three nations that were claimants, none of which could come up with strong evidence. In the Nazi-era cases, we have to remember that the Nazi-era was 13 years, from 33 to 45, not just the war time years. And so as Torie mentioned, objects did change hands several times. It was a robust period for movement of art. The fact that art was in somebody’s family doesn’t indicate who the real owner in the family was. So we’ve seen multiple disputes between families, within families, we’ve seen litigation between heirs. Willie Corte, a researcher that I worked with, was sued criminally, because he made a decision based on information available, and then more information became available later. It didn’t go anywhere, but still, the number of permutations and combinations are very great, and you really…
Katie Wilson-Milne: So how as a lawyer do you approach that? If you’re representing the possessor of something, how do you think about how to button that up?
Tom Kline: Well, in the first instance, it’s through research and someone like Torie pinning down that there’s likely only the one claimant, or if there are other claimants, it’s writing it into the agreement that the, let’s say you’re going to settle an object by making a payment, and the museum keeps the object for the public interest then to display, then, well, in one recent case, we put the money into escrow for a few years to allow other claims to come forward. You could also have a promise in the agreement that the heirs will indemnify the museum. That’s a little tricky though because the heirs-
Katie Wilson-Milne: May not have that money.
Tom Kline: Yeah, probably normal class stiffs like us, and they don’t have a lot of resources to do that. But I did have one case where a claim came in from another person who thought they were an heir, and I talked to the lawyer that I had done the agreement with, and she said, our problem, we’ll take care of it.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That’s the best case scenario. I mean, sometimes you have to have them go to what we call in New York Surrogate’s Court, to get a court order that they are the lawful heirs of whoever were the original owners. Sometimes you can’t figure that out. You need to say, you go get the legal paperwork and come back to me when you have it.
Tom Kline: Right, and they could be getting it from a German court also. So it’s very hard to preempt something like that. It’s just reducing the likelihood through scorching research, thorough research, working with somebody like Torie who can really check the corners, scrub everything down.
Steve Schindler: Torie, in making these kinds of decisions, and I realize you’re not necessarily the one making the final decision, but there are, we look at legal claims where there’s precedent and jurisprudence to guide you through what the likely outcome would be in court, and then we’ve been discussing ethical issues, which we see more in colonial issues, Native American issues. How do you balance those things, or do you?
Victoria Reed: I think that’s a good question, and I’m, again, very aware that I’m talking to three lawyers, and I have no legal training. I have in the course of the last two decades, cherry picked my knowledge of the law and understand certain cases here and there and what they mean. So my job is not to be legal counsel, but I do think that there is the basic precept in US law that a thief cannot convey title, and that is what we rest many of our decisions on. We have a collections policy. We have a collections policy that states that we will not acquire anything known to have been stolen, and now we go back to how do we interpret that policy in a consistent way? Are we just talking about works of art that were taken off someone’s wall at gunpoint, or are we talking about archaeological looting? Are we talking about state expropriation and war loot and colonial-era transfers? So I think that we may be making ethically-based decisions that are guided or underpinned by the legal concept of once a theft occurs, that object remains stolen.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, but that’s tough, right? Because legally duress is not theft. We use this term colonial-era transfers, but these were, you know, many functioning societies where there were shopkeepers and people selling things they made and selling antiquities and, you know, just it’s too broad a statement. So, and I think what’s so hard and really interesting about the question Steve posed is that the harder cases, you know, the more we dive into this as, as lawyers and researchers and art historians, the more you realize that at the end of the inquiry is a bunch of really hard cases where something’s not unlawfully possessed by a museum. And yet, there are these questions about whether the museum should have it. And we’re going to talk about, I think, one of the most compelling and interesting examples of that, this, you know, return of property to the descendants of an enslaved person who made something in the course of their slavery. There’s no legal claim there or not one that’s readily apparent. And in a lot of the colonial context, as we see in Europe, much more than the United States, just because of the nature of our history and of our museum collections. You know, there’s not really a legal claim. A lot of the repatriation requests coming from modern day nation states, some of which are, you know, don’t have a lot of, I think, merit, but some of them do, perhaps even if non-legal. So do you think of your job as helping the MFA figure out whether it should hold something on an ethical basis, or are you attuned to the potential legal claim from the beginning, or is that irrelevant to you?
Victoria Reed: Well, I think it’s both. And I know Tom has taught me that, he’s saying that the law is the minimum standard, right? It’s the minimum standard that we should be adhering to. You don’t have a choice about whether to obey the law. And we are public educational institutions. We’re here to serve the public. And it doesn’t help our public, it doesn’t serve the public interest if we’re holding on to stolen artwork. So I think that my job is to help the museum collect and hold its collections in the most ethical way possible.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I mean, I think that’s a real shift in museum practice. For so long, we saw, you know, museums kind of ignore this, and then sort of take the legal claims seriously. But, you know, fight it out on a legal basis, even if they would do it on the merits, right? Even if, you know, we’ve evolved so that we’re not fighting about statutes of limitations, which of course we still are to some degree, but, you know, I would say less so. Even if you’re saying, okay, well, we won’t even argue the procedural stuff. We’ll look at the merits. But if it doesn’t fit into a legally cognizable claim, why would we give it back? We’re the rightful owner.
Tom Kline: I would like to add to this discussion, the complexity that the point of view of the viewer is always significant. And Tori’s been doing this work for 20 years. I’ve been doing it for 30. And the view of a certain set of facts varies not only with personal perspective, but also with the time perspective. Like 30 years ago, no one would even ask the question, is a slave-created object stolen from that person? It was handled under the law of the time. And we have a lot of cases that go off, up to now, on the act of state doctrine. Well, a person may have been stealing the art in Germany, but the Nazi government was recognized by the United States before we got involved in World War II, and the takings were lawful.
Katie Wilson-Milne: You say the law can evolve, but also even if the law doesn’t evolve, we look at things differently.
Tom Kline: The law can evolve in morality definitely, and view of ethics definitely involves, and that’s what Torie and the MFA have been at the forefront of.
Steve Schindler: Is there ever a consideration in terms of both the art as a collection, let’s say, and possibly who you’re giving it back to? Is there any obligation, I guess, to the art itself so that maybe not wanting to divide a collection, maybe not wanting to send one piece to this government, one piece to that government, particularly if the recipients are not really going to take care of them or display them in any way, are those considerations as well as just the sort of, did it come from this country, should it go back? I mean, are there other things?
Victoria Reed: No, not really. I mean, I think that if we are making a decision to deaccession something, remove it from the collection and transfer ownership to a claimant, whether that claimant is a country, whether it is a Native American tribe, whether it is the descendants of a Holocaust victim, we are acknowledging that it rightfully belongs to them. And what they do with it is really up to them. You can’t repatriate Native American burial goods and say, but I want these to be in a museum. I mean, that would be incredibly insulting.
Katie Wilson-Milne: But perhaps when you’re repatriating something to a modern day nation state that has a loose connection with that object’s history and it’s not a legal claim, right? Obviously, if it’s a legal claim, lawyers will argue about it, but there’ll be some decision on what the law requires. But if it’s a non-legal claim and everyone sort of understands that, then it seems like there’s a lot of discretion in just figuring out whether something belongs to that party or not. Because in no technical sense does a work by, you know, a Benin artisan 300 years ago belong to the modern day Nigerian government, right? But like, I think these are harder questions. So you are making some calls. And maybe in those cases where the law doesn’t dictate an answer and history doesn’t dictate a clear answer, because the parties are really different than the original makers, the museum does get to make some choices about what the right ethical thing to do is. And those factors of where it’s going don’t play in.
Victoria Reed: No, I mean, I think that if we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve made a decision and we are confident that we’re transferring it to the rightful party, then that’s that, then it’s theirs.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So the hard thing is the rightful party, not what to do with that. That’s really not. Yeah, that makes sense.
Tom Kline: But there are questions that would factor into that analysis. For example, would you return an object to Yemen or Syria right now, if you thought they were the owner?
Victoria Reed: Well, this actually did come up, because we received a bequest in 2014. It was 2014. It was a large collection of African and Oceanic objects. And there were two Malian antiquities in this bequest. And it was very clear that they had been trafficked and that they should go back to Mali. And we reached out to Mali. We were in touch with the Cultural Heritage Office there. We had an ownership agreement drawn up. We had it translated into French. We were all prepared to transfer ownership. But we were really never able to finalize the paperwork. And this went on for several years, during which time there was a tremendous amount of upheaval in Mali. Eventually, we reached out to ambassadors from the UN. And they took responsibility for signing the legal agreement and ensuring that the objects were safely transported back to Mali. And I think in that case, it might not be up to us to determine when it is safe. It might be the country of origin, for example, that is in the best position to determine when it is safe to send something back physically. I think it can always be a conversation. I don’t think anyone wants to harm these works of art. I don’t think anyone wants to send something into a war zone. I think the question is who gets to make that call and how.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right, and if you have an available party to negotiate with.
Victoria Reed: Yeah.
Tom Kline: Have you used the safe haven rules that have been put in place both by statute and by one of the museum associations?
Katie Wilson-Milne: What are those, Tom?
Tom Kline: There’s a notion that museums can hold on to objects that it doesn’t own, because they can’t restitute it for whatever reason, but there are limitations on what they can do with it. Then when the reason is gone, they need to return it.
Victoria Reed: Yeah, we have not. I’m not aware of any instances of any museum using that, but I could be wrong.
Steve Schindler: So should we move on to the main topic that brought us here today?
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah. Let’s talk about this groundbreaking example of restitution that both of you worked on in the case of David Drake, who is known as Dave the Potter. Maybe Torie, could you give some background on this man and his work and how it came to be in the MFA’s collection?
Victoria Reed: Yes. Again, another caveat that I’m really not an expert on David Drake, but my colleague Ethan Lasser, and I did remember his title. He’s the Chief of Curatorial. So he at the time was curator in our American Art Department, and he is really the expert on David Drake with colleagues from the Met and University of Michigan. He was helping to organize an exhibition called Hear Me Now. And this was about the Black potters of Edgefield, South Carolina. David Drake was an enslaved potter. He created these monumental stoneware vessels. He was literate, he learned to read and write, and he inscribed many of these vessels with, for lack of a better term, poems, short poems or verses. They’re really quite extraordinary. They’re signed and they’re inscribed. In recent years, these vessels have commanded very high prices on the art market. I think for many years they were probably seen as utilitarian. In recent years, the top art museums in the country have been collecting works by David Drake. So when Ethan and his colleagues were organizing Hear Me Now, he brought me into the conversation quite early on. Because I think the question of rightful ownership and the question of, how is the family benefiting in any way from this, from the rise of David Drake in the art world, that was always the elephant in the room. We decided to raise the question of rightful ownership in the exhibition itself. The exhibition opened at the Met, then came to Boston. We had a lot of interpretive material. I wrote a label simply raising the question of rightful ownership and drawing some comparisons to works of art that had been forcibly transferred during the Holocaust, for example, or forcibly sold. We didn’t seek to answer those questions, but we addressed them or raised them, rather. In the meantime, the curatorial team had also involved the descendants of David Drake in the exhibition itself. So they had been contacted by a genealogist. There was a group of descendants that had been identified, and they were interviewed, they appeared in videos on the museum website, they came to the opening, they came to the Scholars Day. So they were very much part of the process, perhaps from day one. That is what laid the scene for all of this. The question of whether a David Drake jar should be subject to restitution, was a candidate for restitution, was one that was posed to me, one that I was thinking about even before we were contacted by the lawyer for the descendants, George Fatheree. So it was something that we had already given a lot of thought to.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That’s interesting. So this is a rare case where there’s not even, we’ll get to the fact that maybe there’s no legal claim at all, but no one had even made a claim, and you were thinking about these objects.
Victoria Reed: Yes.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Because of this exhibition, I guess.
Victoria Reed: Because of the exhibition, and I think because the curatorial team was also thinking about it and because they had this strong relationship with the family and there had been a large article on David Drake’s work, I think in the New York Times, before the exhibition. Even then, this question was being raised. Like, these jars are being sold for X amount of dollars. Who’s benefiting? Are these effectively stolen property? So I started to think about this and I asked off the record, a few people who are in the legal field, what they would think of something like this. I remember one colleague said to me, well, the pyramids in Egypt were built with slave labor, and we’re not going to restitute, those kind of thing. My colleague, Larry Berman, who’s an Egyptologist, I told that story and he’s like, the pyramids were not built by- the pyramids were not actually built by slave labor, but the point remains that that was the first analogy that someone came up with. That got me thinking that, is this really about stolen labor, or is this about stolen property? Because as a museum, we have a template for redressing stolen property claims. We are not able, we would never be able to compensate for stolen labor, for stolen time.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And you’re right, in the history of the world, that’s the story, right?
Victoria Reed: Yes. It also occurred to me that if we are the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, we have acquired these vessels by David Drake, we are putting them under vitrines in the middle of our fine arts galleries, and we’re attributing them to the artist David Drake. We are acknowledging that these represent more than labor. This is not labor. This is a work of art. This is a creation. It was conceptualized under duress, created under duress, and was given away, essentially. It was taken from the artist without any remuneration. And this also got me thinking about how we think about our provenance records, and how many provenance records at the MFA begin- every single record begins with the artist. Now, this is actually something that got under my skin, and I tried to get people to start taking it out, because if you’re putting it at the beginning of every single provenance record, it ceases to lose any meaning. We are assuming that the de facto first owner of any work of art is the artist themselves. And that means that the artist, under normal circumstances, has the agency to decide- if it’s terms of commission, what the terms of the commission are- if they’re going to sell it for how much, if they’re going to give it away to whom. And that agency was stripped from David Drake. We have these circumstances under which we have the artist, the de facto first owner, being forced to part with his creation without any monetary compensation. These are absolutely works of fine art. And so how is this unlike a Holocaust-era claim? And it’s not in that sense.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Torie, let me ask, it seems like from what I’ve read that Drake was making these works with the direction of his owner to sell. So they weren’t made as extensions of himself or as works of fine art. They were made to sell. And maybe Tom can address this, too. Is the analogy in the law as it’s been to things created by slaves, one, two, employees making things in the scope of their employers? This can’t have been an issue of no impression in the United States. This must have come up in legal cases in different contexts, not with respect to art, and I think, as one of you already said, there’s no legal precedent that the descendants of slaves get to have the objects or the value of whatever they created in the course of slavery. So what is the legal analogy to that?
Tom Kline: Well, we didn’t really go down that road in the analysis. Most slavery, historically, I’m searching in my brain, was legal under the law of the time. So you would not find South Carolina law from the mid-1850s to support any kind of an argument of theft. So at some point, you fall back on common sense or contemporary ethics and morality, and you follow the analysis that Torie is mentioning, that the artist had no agency in the language of today.
Katie Wilson-Milne: They were not an employee. They don’t fit into any modern understanding of…
Tom Kline: No. I think Torie mentioned that there is an analogy to the Holocaust, because most of the people who lost it had little or no agency over their art. Maybe they were selling it to get out of the country, like what’s now called flight goods, or they sold it for a small amount of money so they could escape, or whatever it is, or bribe officials. But I think that’s a pretty good analogy. I don’t think- probably there’s an antiquities analysis, but those things are found on the ground by farmers, let’s say, or archaeologists, or night diggers, and they have no rights under local law.
Steve Schindler: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. I think Torie kind of hit on this is that unlike, I mean, there are obviously many, many examples where the labor of enslaved African-Americans in this country created wealth that they don’t have, right? That’s- we know that. But this is a particular example where the actual thing created exists on a pedestal in a museum. It’s signed by an artist with a poem, and I think it’s sort of then- I mean, it’s a thing apart from, say, working on a home or-
Tom Kline: The White House.
Steve Schindler: The White House, for example. I thought of that.
Vitoria Reed: Yeah.
Steve Schindler: It is different, at least some way to look at it.
Victoria Reed: I think so. And I think the fact that these are so extraordinary that they were not just created at the behest of an enslaver, but they were conceptualized under these conditions. Nobody forced David Drake to inscribe the jars with verses. And so the analogy that I kind of came up with, Tom, to your point was that, you know, if the museum had a painting that a Jewish artist in a concentration camp had been forced to paint or paint it under those conditions and that work of art was taken by a camp guard and sold, would we not give it back to the family today? Is there a difference here? And if so, explain what the difference is to me, because I’m not really seeing it.
Tom Kline: Yeah, I think you make a good point, especially about the two line poems, which are very poignant, very personal expressions by him. “Where is my relations?” The poem jar that the MFA has has an inscription on it like that.
Steve Schindler: In this particular case, I think you mentioned that a lawyer for the family came forward. How did you end up working with that lawyer and the family, too, and to reach the ultimate agreement that you did?
Victoria Reed: Yeah, we had a series of conversations. This started under our previous director, Matthew Teitelbaum, and we literally had a couple of Zoom meetings, and then we literally sat down at a table together to- this wasn’t like a one-time conversation, it was a series of conversations and I would say, pretty amicable relationship with the attorney, George Fatheree. I think we all wanted to get to a resolution. Obviously, while I’m sitting here saying there are so many analogies to Holocaust era claims, and we have a template for this, it is in many ways a new kind of claim, a new subject. I think we wanted to have conversations with our trustees. We wanted to have some conversations with scholars outside the MFA to understand their viewpoint. It was a process and Matthew Tidelbaum left at the end of last fiscal year, so at the end of June, and our new director, Pierre Terjanian, is the one who I think really shepherded the conclusion of this, the resolution. And so it was under his leadership that we came to this very specific resolution.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Did you have buy-in, Torie, of your colleagues from the beginning that- you need the will, right? You know you don’t have to do this, right? Again, this is no one sued you in court under cognizable legal theory. So you don’t have to do it. Did you feel like there was broad buy-in to this voluntary approach from the beginning? Or how does that come about?
Victoria Reed: I mean, even within the museum, we keep claims pretty confidential. We’re a large institution, we have a lot of employees. And so in the case of a claim situation, it’s not the kind of thing that I would go and talk to colleagues about. It’s very much a need-to-know basis. We didn’t know how people would react to this. We didn’t know how our colleagues would react to it. We didn’t know how colleagues at other institutions were going to react or the press. What we had to do was make the best decision for the institution.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And present it to the board?
Victoria Reed: Yep.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Okay, so yeah, so you’re not- you do need buy-in from the board.
Victoria Reed: We need buy-in from the board, absolutely. And our board is just fantastic. And I’m not just saying that. They unanimously voted for this resolution.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, wow.
Tom Kline: Yeah, I do want to add without revealing too many things that Torie might not want to reveal, but there was a very strong negotiating team made of the director and Ethan, you mentioned, the head of curatorial, and Torie herself.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right, ok.
Tom Kline: So they used me in the best way that a client can use a lawyer, which is just for technical details or things that needed to be ironed out. But most of the negotiation was done by museum personnel. So, let’s say, the things that could be most sensitive, like things about the price, they understood, the leaders of the museum understood what the board would find important and what they could do. So it was really a very smooth negotiating process, even though there were some thorny issues.
Victoria Reed: Yeah. But I would also say this ties directly into museum governance and how you bring your board along. I mean, you don’t want to just walk in one day and surprise your board of trustees with this completely new claim. And so I think, another going back to the earlier part of our conversation, one part of my job is to keep our board and our collections committee apprised of how the ethics of the field are developing, the kinds of new issues that might be coming up, the kinds of questions we’re going to be asked, and how best to deal with them. And so it’s not like a one-time thing. We’ve never heard of this before. We’re going to vote on it today. They’re part of the conversation as well. It’s just an internal conversation.
Steve Schindler: Right. And is there a conversation around, I mean, obviously, you’re working with what you understood to be the family, but a process by which you either try to identify who the descendants are, or whether these really are all of the descendants. How is that done? Because obviously, sort of record-keeping back at that time and place was not necessarily what it is today.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And there could be hundreds of descendants now if you’re tracing it, honestly.
Steve Schindler: It goes back a lot further than Nazi-looted art.
Victoria Reed: Yeah. And it’s not reasonable to expect the same level of documentation for an enslaved person and their descendants. Absolutely. So the family had worked with a genealogist. We had their genealogical report. We conferred independently with a different genealogist to make sure that the conclusions were sound, and we had agreement there. Tom can speak more to the indemnification issue, and perhaps a little bit about what George was doing, to decide and invite additional descendants to come forward and make that assessment himself about whether or not they are part of this group.
Tom Kline: Yeah, I think MFA was really aided by the fact that this is a terrific family. Unlike some other claims in the Holocaust context, this claim did not bring the family together. They already were together. They’re local in the DC area. They do events together. They know each other well. So it’s one pod, if you will. There are undoubtedly other pods, probably multiple ones who are descendants. And I quoted one of David Drake’s poems, “I wonder where my relations is.” He did have, I think, a wife and a child sold down the river, literally. So we haven’t heard from those people. So we addressed it in a couple of ways. The primary way is through this family. Fatheree, George Fatheree, the lawyer for the family, created a trust. The jars were resituted to the trust. This is all public information, I’m not disclosing anything. And the jar will stay in the trust for at least two years to allow other claims to be made. Any, of the one jar that’s being returned, and the funds will be held in escrow and only can be used for a limited number of expenses and the rest retained if there has to be some kind of indemnification. But, and most importantly in this case, and what makes this case different from others is the family is taking responsibility for vetting any claimants who come forward. And if they decide with their genealogist that the claimants are legitimate descendants of David Drake, they will add them to the group. And they’ll share in the recovery and in the future efforts. And if they don’t vet them, then there’s really not much left for the museum to do, because the museum is going to say, well, if you couldn’t convince the family that you’re part of the family, what do you want us to do?
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right. I guess they could sue, but on what basis?
Tom Kline: Yeah. And I think a judge would take very seriously the fact that the family has a structure, has a lawyer, has a trust, has a genealogist and a process, and the process said no.
Katie Wilson-Milne: It’s very creative to deal with that kind of uncertainty about descendants by creating an entity. So instead of paying individual people that can spend the money and then it’s gone, and so if other claimants come along, what are they to do? To create an entity that represents unknown family members. I mean, that’s really interesting, and I’ve been thinking about that as a model for different types of claims.
Tom Kline: Well, I hope so, and I thank Torie for being so agreeable to work with. Museum always knew what they wanted, and I think it is a creative solution, but it was a natural outgrowth of the circumstances.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So what was the settlement? Can you walk us through?
Tom Kline: Torie, why don’t you-
Katie Wilson-Milne: What the resolution was?
Victoria Reed: Oh, yes. So we had two vessels by David Drake in the collection.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Have you bought those from private collectors?
Victoria Reed: As a provenance researcher, I should know this.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Just curious. They were somewhat recent purchases.
Victoria Reed: They were somewhat recent purchases. So we deaccessioned both of them. We transferred title to both vessels back to the trust, and then we repurchased one of the vessels from the family. So this was an extra step. Normally in resolving Nazi-era claims, for example, we, at least in the past, we have reached a financial settlement and not gone through the process of deaccessioning and reaccessioning. You have to change the credit line. You have to give it a new accession number. You have to, there’s all this paperwork that goes along with deaccessioning that you don’t really think about. But I think it had tremendous symbolic value to do it this way, so we bought back one of the jars. That jar remains on view. It’s in our folk art gallery, and the family owns the other vessel. It is on loan to the museum, so it has a loan number, but we’re not the owner.
Steve Schindler: But is it a long-term loan or, I mean, I think I’d seen an interview, or maybe it was in the New York Times, the family talking about it and saying, well, we don’t want to keep this valuable jar in our home and have the kids sort of walking by and you know. It’s in some ways safer being on view in the museum, even though they own it.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Well, and they’re proud of his legacy, right?
Steve Schindler: Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Right.
Katie Wilson-Milne: They want people to see it, which is just an incredible perspective.
Tom Kline: They also want to publicize the fact that they’re making claims, and have succeeded in claims so more people can come forward if they feel that they’re part of the family.
Steve Schindler: This is one set of claims, but there have been at least- I read about the possibility that obviously there are other museums and other pieces, and- has there been any effort to your knowledge by the family to go after those as well?
Victoria Reed: That is something that I can’t and won’t answer on a podcast.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Maybe we’ll find out, actually, just as time goes by. Maybe more broadly, do you see this as a model of dealing with other property? I mean, I think we talked about this. It’s not just enslaved people in the United States. There’s a way you could zoom out on this, and it could be quite enormous, especially with antiquities and property from the Middle East and North Africa and various places. So I guess to what extent do you see this being applicable to other types of objects that before now there’s been no claimant, but now this idea of, well, if they’re descendants of a person who may be made this or contributed to an object, I mean, do you see this impacting a big group of objects?
Victoria Reed: Yeah, we thought about that. We thought all of this through as part of our process. What kind of precedent might this set for us? Are there other objects in the collection that would be restitutable under this set of criteria? I think it’s unlikely to affect a large group of objects. For the most part, we don’t know the names of enslaved artists. And that makes it nearly impossible to identify comparable works of art in the collection. I think it’s pretty extraordinary that there was a group of identified descendants in this case also. So it’s certainly possible. We can always uncover more information in the process of research. But I don’t think that this is a Pandora’s box. I think whenever there’s a new topic in restitution, there’s always a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction from people in general saying, well, is this going to open the floodgates? Are we going to empty our museums now? And it hasn’t happened yet.
Steve Schindler: The British Museum has been saying that for the last 20 years.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Well, they won’t give anything back, so that’s why that’s not working.
Steve Schindler: Right, well, but if you send one thing back, then you can send everything back.
Victoria Reed: Yeah, we have restituted so many works of art in my time at the MFA, and we still have 500,000 works of art in the collection. And our galleries are still full, so I think it’s an unfounded fear.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And do you have other objects by enslaved artists, that even if you don’t know their names, present a category of interesting ownership questions? Not that they’ll be restituted, because, they’re just as you said, there’s not enough information, but is this a category of object that has sort of gone under the radar at museums?
Victoria Reed: I suppose that it could. I mean, we tried to identify other objects in the collection. And like, for example, we have a pair of andirons that are on view or have been on view. And they came to us with a kind of anecdotal story that they had been made by enslaved makers. And again, like, is that true? Is it not true? Is it just family lore? So it’s very hard to have the kind of specific information that we have in this case.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And obviously, I mean, it’s always important to remember that the US is made up of many, many, many small museums that don’t have a lot of resources, even though on this podcast, we tend to talk about the big, most famous museums, often in coastal cities. But I can imagine that there might be a lot of objects like this at smaller museums all over the Southeast and, you know, that actually are important places for people of all backgrounds to go and see them, and hopefully there’s storytelling. But they don’t have, I know you haven’t disclosed the amount of what you paid for the pot, but the New York Times reported it, you guessed it was somewhere around a million dollars. They just do not have the resources to engage in a settlement like this. It’s just not possible. So, you know, I do, I guess it can be a model to a certain extent, but it does require a certain level of, like, the sophistication of your team that you described, and Tom, and then the resources to pay the family.
Victoria Reed: Yeah. I mean, I think whenever you’re dealing with an ethical claim, you have the opportunity for more creative problem solving. And while not every museum is the MFA, I think our settlement or our resolution shows is that restitution doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, and that it’s not always a matter of just deaccessioning and giving back. You can come up with different ways to resolve ownership disputes, and particularly if you’re not bound by the letter of the law, there are different ways that you can do that. And it may be that a museum of a different size or that has a different mission, frankly, might want to resolve a similar claim in a different way.
Steve Schindler: Well, thank you, Torie. This was really great.
Victoria Reed: Thank you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to come on here and speak a little bit. And yeah, it’s been wonderful working with Tom on these issues, and yeah.
Tom Kline: And we never got to say that the MFA is the industry leader and at the forefront of developing these issues.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Oh, I mean, definitely.
Tom Kline: But I think it’s apparent from the discussion.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I mean, I had several friends who never e-mail me about anything related to what I do take real interest in the David Drake settlement, you know, that really resonated with them as something novel and important and new.
Victoria Reed: Yeah, yeah. No, it really reached- it really got an overwhelmingly positive response. You know, I was saying before we didn’t know how people were going to react, and it’s been really heartening to see the tremendous public support for this decision.
Steve Schindler: Great. Thank you. And that’s it for today’s podcast. Please subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts, and send us feedback at podcast@schlaw.com. And if you like what you hear, give us a five-star rating. We are also featuring the original music of Chris Thompson. And finally, we want to thank our fabulous producer, Jackie Santos, for making us sound so good.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Until next time, I’m Katie Wilson-Milne.
Steve Schindler: And I’m Steve Schindler bringing you the Art Law Podcast, a podcast exploring the places where art intersects with and interferes with the law.
Katie Wilson-Milne: The information provided in this podcast is not intended to be a source of legal advice. You should not consider the information provided to be an invitation for an attorney-client relationship, should not rely on the information as legal advice for any purpose, and should always seek the legal advice of competent counsel in the relevant jurisdiction.
Music by Chris Thompson. Produced by Jackie Santos.