Ivory Ban Update - Winter 2017

1. BEIJING—China says it will ban all domestic ivory trade by the end of 2017, closing down the world’s biggest ivory market in a move wildlife conservationists believe will help curb elephant poaching in Africa.

The announcement deals a blow to a global ivory industry sustained in large part by Chinese demand, and comes after years of international and domestic pressure on Beijing to interdict a trade that has threatened the extinction of wild African elephants.

“China’s announcement is a game changer for elephant conservation,” Carter Roberts, chief executive of World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement. “The large-scale trade of ivory now faces its twilight years.”

In a directive published late Friday, the State Council—China’s cabinet—said the shutdown of the domestic ivory industry will take place in phases, with an initial group of processing plants and retail outlets due to close by the end of March. Government agencies will assist ivory-industry workers in their transition to related professions, such as wood and bone carving or artifact-restoration in museums.

Current owners of ivory products will be allowed to keep them, transfer them as gifts, bequeath them to descendants, or sell them at supervised auctions after securing official approval. Authorities will also step up enforcement against ivory-related businesses and launch campaigns to educate the public on the iniquities of the ivory trade.

In China, ivory is often regarded as a symbol of wealth and status, and high-quality carvings enjoy significant collectible value. Chinese demand helps sustain a poaching industry that kills between 20,000 and 30,000 elephants annually, according to World Wildlife Fund.

China has been the leading destination for African-sourced ivory since at least 2002, according to data from the Elephant Trade Information System, an international monitoring tool set up under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or Cites. Some wildlife experts estimate that Chinese consumers receive as much as 70% of the global ivory supply.

Although China is a party to Cites, which banned the international ivory trade in 1989, wildlife experts say rising demand from a swelling Chinese middle class has fueled a resurgence in elephant killings in the past decade.

Elephant populations in the African savanna shrank by about 30% from 2007 to 2014, according to the Great Elephant Census, a research effort backed by wildlife nonprofit Elephants Without Borders, which counted about 352,000 elephants in 18 African countries.

Many international wildlife groups targeted China in long-running publicity campaigns, urging officials to intervene and consumers to boycott ivory products. Attitudes among some younger, urban Chinese have been changing too in recent years, with some celebrities joining wildlife-conservation campaigns.

In a reflection of that, news of the ivory ban was mostly well-received on Chinese social media. “The country’s rollout of new protection measures is the best New Year’s gift to elephants,” Li Bingbing, a popular Chinese actress, wrote Saturday on her verified Weibo microblog. “Hope to hear more good news about protecting endangered species.”

Beijing has taken steps to address the issue in recent years, including stepping up enforcement against illegal ivory smuggling.

‘The country’s rollout of new protection measures is the best New Year’s gift to elephants’
—Li Bingbing, Chinese actress

In September 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama jointly pledged to “enact nearly complete bans on ivory import and export” and to “take significant and timely steps to halt the domestic commercial trade of ivory.”

China has 34 designated ivory-processing factories and 143 designated sales centers, all of which must be shut down by the end of 2017, the State Forestry Administration said on its official Weibo social-media account.

Conservationists estimate China’s ivory industry comprises 89 companies employing fewer than 3,000 people, while their remaining ivory stock is worth less than $156 million, according to a 2016 report by World Wildlife Fund and wildlife-trade monitor Traffic.

Many of these firms have started to diversify their operations, which suggests “not all affected employees will lose their livelihoods as a consequence of an ivory trade ban,” the report said.

It wasn’t clear how China’s ban may affect the ivory trade in Hong Kong, where authorities in December proposed legislative changes to end the local ivory trade by 2021. Industry representatives have opposed the plan, which the city’s legislature will consider in the coming months. Some wildlife conservationists expressed concern Hong Kong’s slower ban could turn the former British colony into a ivory-trading hot spot.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-to-shut-down-ivory-trade-by-end-of-2017-1483141688

New Spring 2017 Intern: Mary Moss

Hi everyone! My name is Mary Moss and I am very pleased to introduce myself as the new intern at Shango Galleries. I am currently a senior at the University of Dallas and will be receiving my degree in Human Sciences this coming May. While many of my classes have been in sociology and anthropology, my program has given me the liberty to pursue my interest in art history through my electives. My Dad is originally from Quito, Ecuador, which has given me a special appreciation for tribal and indigenous artwork, particularly from Ecuador and Paraguay. So as you can imagine, the opportunity presented by John and company here at Shango Galleries is an absolute thrill for me. Throughout my time here at Shango Galleries, I hope to learn a great deal about the stories behind each piece within their own historical context (as many as I possibly can) and gain experience in the day-to-day operations of an art gallery. As I get ready to embark into post-grad life, I am so grateful to have found an opportunity to continue learning in a field that is of interest to me.

Art and Terrorism Winter 2017

1. MOSUL - British Museum training Iraqi experts to save Mosul heritage.
One of the world's leading institutions for the study of ancient Iraq, the London museum has been training Iraqi experts for the past year in high-tech methods to preserve and document their history.

"Once the city is liberated, there will be an enormous plan of reconstruction of the Museum of Mosul," Sebastien Rey, a lead archaeologist from the Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme, told AFP.

"One of the participants of our scheme will be the first archaeologist to enter the museum and do an assessment of the destruction inside."

The programme is designed to "get people ready for the day" archaeological sites are taken back from IS control, said its director, Jonathan Tubb.

"We wanted to do something positive and constructive in the face of the most appalling destruction that had been going on."

Islamist militants in Iraq, Syria and Mali have targeted priceless cultural heritage sites after denouncing them as un-Islamic.

The Mosul area, home to several archaeological sites including the ancient cities of Nineveh and Nimrud, is of particular importance.

In April 2015, the IS group released a video of its fighters destroying monuments in Nimrud before planting explosives around a site and blowing it up.

Statues in Mosul's museum were also attacked, as was Hatra, a Roman-era site in Nineveh province.

The Iraqi army launched a massive operation in October to retake Mosul, Iraq's second city and the IS group's last major stronghold in the country.

After recapturing the city's eastern flank, special forces are now fighting their way through the west in an offensive that began on Sunday.

New discoveries
Launched in January 2016, the British Museum's six-month training scheme sees Iraqi archaeologists spend three months in London and three months in Iraq.

It includes training in the use of satellite imagery and digital mapping, as well as tools for documenting buildings and monuments.

The archaeologists then practise their new skills in secure sites across their home country, which has led to new discoveries.

In Darband-i Rania, located in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, the new excavations unveiled a previously unknown fortified city.

"We found a city from the Parthian period, that’s roughly the time of Christ," John MacGinnis, a senior archaeologist from the British Museum explained.

In the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, or Tello, in southern Iraq, massive mud-brick walls belonging to a temple constructed in the third millennium BC, were discovered.

Tello has also proved useful for training because it is huge at around 250 hectares and has a very similar topographical layout to sites closer to Mosul.

'Change direction of history'
The museum has long called for Britain to ratify an international convention to protect cultural artifacts in war zones, a measure that is currently making its way through parliament in London.

In 2003, it raised the alarm on looting of major Iraqi museums and led a taskforce to the country in response to damage inflicted on cultural sites by the conflicts in the region.

A graduate of the British Museum scheme, which aims to train 50 archaeologists over a five-year period, is now leading the assessment in Nimrud.

And Halkawt Qadir Omer, a current trainee from Arbil told AFP: "The training is very useful and beneficial for us and we can use the tools that we get here."

Known as the cradle of civilisation, Iraq is still full of undiscovered treasures.

For Omer, the scheme offers much more than simple tools: "Now, we have contact with the British Museum to complete our projects, to discover and to change the direction of history and archaeology."

http://artdaily.com/news/93936/British-Museum-training-Iraqi-experts-to-save-Mosul-heritage#.WK3_HhIrJsM

2. PALMYRA - ISIS Back in Palmyra. Amphitheater Blasted. Tetrapylon Destroyed. Assad and Putin Blame US.

Back in Palmyra. Amphitheater Blasted. Tetrapylon Destroyed. Assad and Putin Blame US.

January 22, 2017. In March 2016, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin boasted of driving out ISIS and recovering the ancient World Heritage site and modern city of Palmyra. In Assad’s case, taking Palmyra from ISIS resulted in his first positive international press in decades.

After Russian and Syrian government forces took the ancient site, they organized a veritable media feast celebrating their role as saviors of culture. In May, dozens of members of the world press and UNESCO officials were flown to a performance in Palmyra’s ancient amphitheater led by conductor Valery Gergiev with the St. Petersburg Mariinsky Theater orchestra.

Russian President Putin introduced the program by video, contrasting the civilization represented by the presence of the orchestra with the violence and barbarism of ISIS. As a violinist played Bach, Russian television interspersed various shots of Putin, along with images of murdered 81-year-old Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, Russian soldiers who had died in the conflict, pretty Palmyran children holding bouquets, and bombed out Syrian cities.


By the fall of 2016, however, the Syrian regime and Russia had abandoned Palmyra’s site and its citizens and moved their forces on to attack Aleppo. Virtually ignored by the Syrian government, which was busy destroying Allepo’s ancient sites along with the modern city, Palmyra was recaptured by ISIS in mid-December 2016.

One of ISIS’ first steps was to demonstrate its contempt for the regime and for history by adding to its list of destroyed Syrian ancient monuments. On January 20, 2017, the world press reported that aerial photographs showed that the rear façade of the world-famous Palmyra amphitheater has been blown up. The Tetrapylon, another of Palmyra’s most famous monuments, has also been destroyed.

Palmyran city council official Omar Albenia told CNN: “We at the council of Palmyra and Badia condemn this cowardly terrorist attack carried out by ISIS and also place the blame of the Syrian regime of what is happening in Palmyra when the city of Palmyra has exchanged hands between ISIS and the Syrian regime several times.” Albenia also stated that 11 civilians had been executed by ISIS.

Putin and Assad, however, blame the US entirely for the retaking of Palmyra and its continuing destruction.

Sputnik News reported that, “President Assad has blamed the US for supervising the recapture of the historic site. Russian political and defense analysts have elaborated why the US might have resorted to such a barbaric operation.”

Sputnik also quoted an interview with Assad by Japanese broadcaster TBS: “They [Daesh jihadists] could retake Palmyra under the supervision of the Americans, under the surveillance of American drones; they came through the desert and they occupied Palmyra.”

Araik Stepanyan, executive secretary of the Presidium of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, chimed in with the excuse that as the Syrian army has been “liberating Aleppo and other towns and cities from the terrorists, it simply did not have enough force to keep Palmyra under control.” Like Assad, Stepanyan also claimed that the Palmyra region was under the control of the US and its coalition and they should be held responsible. According to Sputnik, Stepyan said that “rebel units controlled by Americans have actually been redeployed from Mosul to Raqqa, then to Deir ez-Zor and further on to Palmyra. Thus all the responsibility for this venture lies solely on the US.”

No US official has responded to these patently false propaganda claims.

Update: It appears that Palmyra may soon change hands again. News outlets AMN and Sputnik claimed as of January 27, 2017 that pro-government forces were “highly active” in the Palmyran combat zone and intent on recapturing the region.

For important reporting on the destruction in Syria and access to aerial images of the recent destruction, visit the ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiative, Special Report: Update on the Situation in Palmyra.

According to Abdulhadi Najjar: “The Tetrapylon consists of a square platform bearing at each corner a tight grouping of four columns. Each of the four groups of pillars supports 150,000kg of solid cornice. A pedestal at the centre of each quartet originally carried a statue.

Only one of the 16 pillars is of the original pink granite … the rest are a result of some rather hasty reconstruction carried out from the 1960s onwards by the Syrian Antiquities Department.

From here the main colonnaded street continues northwest, while smaller pillared transverse streets lead southwest to the agora and northeast to the Temple of Baal Shamin.” Wikimedia. [Baal Shamin was also destroyed by ISIS in August 2015.]

https://committeeforculturalpolicy.org/isis-back-in-palmyra-amphitheater-blasted-tetrapylon-destroyed-assad-and-putin-blame-us/

Trump and the Art Market Winter 2017

1. NEW YORK (AFP).- Executives at New York's Lincoln Center made a joint appeal Tuesday for the United States to preserve arts funding, warning that steep cuts mulled by President Donald Trump would have devastating effects.

Leaders of the prestigious complex's institutions -- including the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic and New York City Ballet -- said arts funding benefited people from children to veterans and also "anchors communities."

"In American cities and towns, arts institutions and districts are breathing life into neighborhoods -- attracting investment, spurring development, fueling innovation and creating jobs," they wrote in a statement.

Unlike in Europe, cultural funding in the United States is largely private. But the Lincoln Center executives said it was vital to preserve the underlying leadership from the National Endowment for the Arts which last year received $148 million in government appropriations.

The Lincoln Center executives pointed to the endowment's statistics that the arts -- which covers everything from concert tickets to the movie industry -- generated $704.2 billion in economic benefits each year across the United States.

"A great America needs that kind of return," they wrote without explicitly naming Trump.

The Trump administration has proposed major cuts in federal funding, especially foreign aid -- except for a $54 billion boost in military spending.

Arts funding has been a perennial target for some US conservatives, who highlight controversial works and question the need for government support.

http://artdaily.com/news/94154/Lincoln-Center-heads-urge-Trump-to-keep-funding-arts-#.WLcffBIrJsM

Tribal Winter 2017

1. First Americans: Tribal Art from North America

After a long journey around the world, the Bowers Museum’s special exhibition featuring selections from our own Native American collection will be on view in Santa Ana!

First Americans includes artwork representative of the native people from the Arctic North, the Northwest Coast, California, the Southwest and the Great Plains. The exhibition first traveled to Bogotá, Colombia’s Museo del Oro in 2011 and then was shown in three museums in China from 2014 to 2015. Several of our collection’s most important works will be on display in the exhibition, including what may be the earliest example of a transitional Navajo First Phase Chief 's blanket, an early Hopi katsina doll, and from Baja, California, a rare Seri feathered kilt.

https://www.bowers.org/index.php/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/483-first-americans-tribal-art-from-north-america

2. SANTA FE - Tribal Art Dealers Deliver on Voluntary Returns

January 31, 2017. Board members of the Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association (ATADA) have helped US collectors and art dealers to make voluntary returns of important sacred and ceremonial objects to Southwest tribes through a program that began in December 2016. The initiative, which is ongoing, is part of a concerted effort to meet tribal goals by returning objects that are important to community spiritual health. Dealers and collectors now have a direct means of returning objects collected many decades before.

ATADA is a professional group that has grown over the years to include collectors and museums. The group sees the returns as a positive step in building badly-needed bridges between the collecting and tribal communities. Another immediate goal was to engage tribal participation in ATADA educational initiatives and create a dialog between art dealers, collectors, and tribal communities. A seminar involving all parties is now planned for May 2017 in Santa Fe.

ATADA is working on additional returns through direct outreach to collectors and to tribes. Robert Gallegos, an ATADA board member who organized the first returns to Hopi and Zuni in December, says both collectors and tribes have welcomed the opportunity to work together. “We think this is the right thing to do, regardless of what happens with future legislation. We want to work respectfully and we are counting on the tribes to help us.”

Gallegos said he was grateful to have a chance to explain the dealer’s position. “We will all be harmed, dealers and tribal artisans both, if legislation is passed that stigmatizes collecting. The tribes are worried about the effect on their markets too. Part of our message to tribal leaders is that we probably won’t agree on everything, but we’ll work with them honestly and we know there are ways to move forward together.”

By making returns under tribal direction and with respect for ritual processes, ATADA also hoped to show that voluntary returns would be both more productive and more apt to keep tribal religious concerns private, more so than any official government processes. The STOP Act legislation introduced last year called for seizure at US borders and would have required government agencies to potentially hold sacred objects in possession, physically treating them like any other judicial evidence. Throughout the voluntary repatriation process facilitated by ATADA, great care was taken to keep physical contact and exposure of the objects limited such that they were not viewed in public, they were minimally touched, and were stored in a manner dictated by the tribes themselves—for example, the tribes object to using plastic to wrap objects (tribes often consider such items as living entities, which need to breathe).

ATADA has stated that it would strongly support legislation that would provide direct funding for tribal cultural education, expanding tribal cultural heritage offices and building tribal institutions. “There are lots of collectors who would like to help build tribal institutions through donation of artworks, not just sacred items, which have another place in society. Collectors have had to donate to places like the Museum of Northern Arizona [which acts as steward for many artifacts for Southwestern tribes] because there aren’t tribal museums to give objects to. There needs to be a structure in the future for people to deduct donations, too,” said Gallegos.

ATADA stressed that government has a part to play in getting foreign governments and museums to return items that were exported with permits issued long ago under the Antiquities Act. Measures are needed for repatriating human remains (referred to by the tribes as ancestors), including veterans’ remains buried overseas. However, ATADA made clear that it would not support the STOP Act as it was originally written, nor any other legislation that sought to expand NAGPRA into the private sphere. It believes this would be catastrophic for thousands of US businesses, collectors, and museums that depend on them—and damage contemporary Native artists and their communities as well.

ATADA noted that the 2016 STOP Act would have seriously impacted Southwest communities that are dependent on tourism. In New Mexico, for example, cultural industries account for $1.37 billion in wages and salaries, as much as the state’s mining industry. Employment in cultural tourism, art and cultural education equaled nearly one in ten jobs (9.8%) in the state. Tribal communities have been particularly concerned that misunderstanding of federal laws would taint the entire contemporary market, as Alaska native carvers of marine mammal ivory have suffered a 40% drop in revenue as a result of federal and state laws affecting elephant ivory.


https://committeeforculturalpolicy.org/tribal-art-dealers-deliver-on-voluntary-returns/


3. SAN ANTONIO, TX.- On February 24, 2017, the San Antonio Museum of Art opened an exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art, titled Of Country and Culture: The Lam Collection of Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art. The exhibition is drawn from a collection gifted to the Museum earlier this year by long-time supporters May and Victor Lam.

With approximately 75 works on view, the exhibition explores the contemporary application of a range of Aboriginal artistic traditions—from sand paintings, to body painting, to grave poles—to demonstrate similar cultural ties to land, heritage and visual communication. The collection includes a significant number of works by women artists, representing a recent change from their historical exclusion from the contemporary painting movement in Australia.

“With bold colors and materials, these works are made to be beautiful, but also to speak to people about communal history and events, reminding us that art is something cultures need,” said Katie Luber, the Kelso Director of the San Antonio Museum of Art. “We are incredibly grateful for May and Victor’s generosity and for launching us into a new area of collecting, furthering our ability to connect more deeply with other cultures and art historical periods.”

The Lams’ enthusiasm for contemporary Aboriginal art began when they visited the traveling exhibition Spirit Country at the Museum in 2000. These works inspired May Lam, a founding Museum board member, and her daughter Dorothy to travel to Australia to visit Aboriginal communities across the continent. On their trip, they amassed an outstanding collection representative of contemporary indigenous art making throughout Australia. The works range from the mid-1990s through 2007.

“Collecting these works was a process of love without the labor, a deeply energizing experience that taught me so much about Aboriginal culture, both past and present,” said May Lam. “These works opened my eyes to new ways of seeing how artists create. My family and I felt it was important that our community have a similar opportunity, and I am thrilled that the San Antonio Museum of Art has taken our gift and created this new exhibition.”

Aboriginal peoples' presence in Australia dates back at least 50,000 years, making them one of the earliest civilizations. Art has always played an integral role in Aboriginal society and is intimately linked to daily life. The oldest surviving examples of Aboriginal art are cave paintings and rock engravings that are 40,000 years old, predating the cave paintings at Lascaux (present-day France) and Altamira (present-day Spain). Both subject matter and iconography from ancient precedents inform the practices of contemporary Aboriginal artists, who are thus working in the oldest continuous cultural tradition.

Since 1788, when Europeans colonized Australia, Aboriginal Australians have suffered devastating displacement, dispossession, and marginalization. A staggeringly diverse Aboriginal population of 500,000 people—whose groups spoke over 600 unique languages and dialects at the time of colonization—was quickly reduced through violent conflicts, environmental imbalances and diseases, and discrimination.
Despite this tumultuous history, contemporary Aboriginal art has flourished in recent decades. In combining designs and subjects depicted by their ancestors with present-day materials, contemporary Aboriginal artists reclaim their rights to the land and preserve their culture for future generations.

http://artdaily.com/news/94040/Exhibition-of-works-from-the-Lam-Collection-of-Contemporary-Australian-Aboriginal-Art-opens-in-San-Antonio#.WLciaxIrJsM