Theft of Sacred Art

“The Real Secrets around Himalayan Art Surround Those Who Collect It,” Himāl Southasian, February 8, 2024.

“Return the Stolen Artifact, But Keep the Museum Label,” Hyperallergic, February 5, 2024.

“Mighty Shiva Was Never Meant to Live in Manhattan,” New York Times, February 4, 2024.

“In Koh Ker,” London Review of Books, July 14, 2023.

“A Case Study of Academic Facilitation of the Global Illicit Trade in Cultural Objects: Mary Slusser in Nepal” (with Emiline Smith), International Journal of Cultural Property (2023).

“Sex Tourism With Statues” (Review of Buddhist Art of Tibet), Hyperallergic, January 3, 2023.

“Cambodia Doesn’t need the Metropolitan Museum’s Help in Preserving its Cultural Heritage,” Hyperallergic, September 6, 2022.

“Returned to Nepal by the FBI, a Sculpture Becomes a God Again,” Hyperallergic, December 17, 2021.

“It Doesn’t Belong in a Museum” (on stolen sacred artwork from Nepal), Foreign Policy, December 5, 2021.

“The Museum as Weapon: Review of Dan Hick’s The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution,” LA Review of Books, September 23, 2020.

“A Benin Bronze With Fishy Provenance Goes to Auction,” Hyperallergic, June 26, 2020.

“Stolen Deities Resurface in a Dallas Museum,” Hyperallergic, January 24, 2020.

Antiquities Looting

“Talking about Heritage Destruction in Market Countries,” The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction, José Antonio González Zarandona, Emma Cunliffe, and Melathi Saldin, eds. (Routledge, 2023).

“‘Said To Be From…’: Ethics and Hidden Provenance in Long-Established Museum Antiquities Collections,” Bryn Mawr Classical Review, May 24, 2023.

“How the Met Museum Justifies Looting,” Hyperallergic, December 22, 2021.

“That Robby Hobby” (on the Museum of the Bible), Slate, October 4, 2021.

“The Silence of Scholars: Review of John Boardman’s A Classical Archaeologist’s Life: The Story So Far,” Anonymous Swiss Collector, March 30, 2021.

“The Lax Compliance of Museums with AAM Guidelines for Ancient Art” (with Mackenzie Priest), Hyperallergic, March 28, 2021. The scholarly version of this essay appeared as “Small Museums, Big Problems: Failure to Comply with the American Alliance of Museums’ Policies on Archaeological Material and Ancient Art” (with Mackenzie Priest), in Donna Yates and Naomi Oosterman, eds., Crime and Art: Sociological and Criminological Perspectives of Crimes in the Art World (Springer, 2021).

“Hobby Lobby's Antiquities Trouble,” Sapiens, July 10, 2017.

“‘But We Didn’t Steal It:’ Collectors’ Justifications for Purchasing Looted Antiquities,” Journal of Art Crime (2015).

“Successes and Failures of Self-Regulatory Regimes Governing Museum Holdings of Nazi Looted Art and Looted Antiques,” Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts, 2013-2014.

“The Relationship between Tax Deductions and the Market for Unprovenanced Antiquities,” Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts, 2010.

Other Pieces on History and Cultural Heritage

“The Stories of Art History’s Detectives,” Hyperallergic, April 17, 2023.

“Artists’ Doomed, Inspiring Resistance to Hitler,” Hyperallergic, November 18, 2022.

“All the Times People Have Shot, Puked Upon, and Meat-Cleavered Famous Paintings to Make a Point,” Slate, October 28, 2022.

“Musket on Your Shoulder and No Bread at Home: On Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.’s ‘The Families’ Civil War’,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 12, 2022.

“Review of Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy, by Fiona Greenland; Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor, by Allison Mickel; and The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures, by Justin M. Jacobs,” The Art Bulletin, June 1, 2022.

“The MFA’s Complicated History with Censoring Queer Desire Pervades New Exhibit,” GBH News, January 4, 2022.

“The Old-White-Malest of Crimes: Insider Theft from Libraries and Archives,” Eidolon, November 4, 2019.

“Which Public? Whose Interest? Rethinking Merryman’s ‘The Public Interest in Cultural Property,’” Art, Antiquity, and Law, December 2017.

“Legal and Ethical Considerations for Digital Recreations of Cultural Heritage,” Chapman Law Review, Spring 2017.

“Cultural Losses and Cultural Gains: Ethical Dilemmas in WWII-Looted Art Repatriation Claims against Public Institutions,” Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal, 2011.

Fakes

“Don’t Buy Egyptian Antiquities, Even if They’re Real,” New York Daily News, August 31, 2021.

“Own a Piece of the (Very Recent) Past,” London Review of Books Blog, April 17, 2020.

“The True Cost of Museum Fakes,” Hyperallergic, March 26, 2020.

“‘Official Fakes’: The Consequences of Governmental Treatment of Forged Antiquities as Genuine during Seizures, Prosecutions, and Repatriations,” Albany Law Review, 2019.

Indigenous Peoples

“Even the Eyelashes” (Review of Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology), London Review of Books, January 4, 2024.

“A New York Museum’s House of Bones,” Hyperallergic, October 15, 2023.

“Dubiously Acquired Objects: On Götz Aly’s ‘The Magnificent Boat’,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 23, 2023.

“The U.S. Capitol Is Filled With Racist Depictions of Native Americans. It’s Time for Them to Go,” Time, February 8, 2022.

“Meet the Indigenous Activist Who Toppled Minnesota’s Christopher Columbus Statue (excerpt from Smashing Statues),” Smithsonian Magazine, February 3, 2022.

Monuments and Protest

“The Most Controversial Statue in America Surrenders to the Furnace,” New York Times, October 27, 2023.

“At Stone Mountain,” London Review of Books, September 28, 2023.

“The Arlington National Cemetery Will Finally Remove Its Racist Monument,” The Nation, May 9, 2023.

“Remember Fort Pillow,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 10, 2023.

“The Question of the Offensive Monument,” The Nation, December 5, 2022.

“Monuments as Monsters: Michael Rakowitz and Erin L. Thompson in Conversation,” Art Journal Open, June 16, 2022.

“Unlike Us, Ancient Societies Knew What to Do With Their Outdated Monuments,” Slate, April 11, 2022.

“Foulest, Vilest, Obscenest: Review of David Freedberg’s Iconoclasm,” London Review of Books, January 27, 2022.

“Confederate Heritage Groups are Keeping the Lost Cause on Life Support,” Washington Post, January 23, 2022.

“The Social Messages of Civil War Monuments,” History Compass (2022).

“Ghosting the Confederacy,” Harper’s Bazaar, October 18, 2021.

“The South’s Monuments Will Rise Again” (opinion piece arguing against re-installation of removed Confederate monuments), Washington Post, March 5, 2021.

“Why Just ‘Adding Context’ to Controversial Monuments May Not Change Minds,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 18, 2020.

“The Problem With NYC’s New Women’s Rights Monument,” The Nation, August 25, 2020.

“What's the Point of Beheading a Statue?” Art in America, June 22, 2020.

“Interview: What Does It Mean to Tear Down a Statue?” New York Times, June 11, 2020.

Guantánamo

“‘APPROVED BY US FORCES’: Showing and Hiding Art from Guantánamo,” in The Guantánamo Artwork and Testimony of Moath Al-Alwi, Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson, eds. (Springer, 2023), pp. 53-69.

“Guantánamo’s Artists Fight for Beauty” (with Maliha Tasnim), Hyperallergic, February 28, 2023.

“The Artwork of Guantánamo Detainees,” The Nation, July 25, 2022.

“‘It’s the Black House Now!’: Mansoor Adayfi’s Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo,” LA Review of Books, August 25, 2021.

“The Guantánamo Spot: Exhibiting Detainee
Art,” The Point, Spring 2019.

“Op Ed: Art Censorship at Guantánamo Bay,” New York Times (November 27, 2017).

“The Art of Keeping Guantánamo Open,” Salon, December 5, 2017.

“Art from Guantánamo,” Paris Review Daily, October 2, 2017.

Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo, catalogue for the exhibition “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo,” President’s Gallery, John Jay College (2017).