Small Nashville museum wants you to know why it’s returning artifacts to Mexico

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – When Bonnie Seymour got a job as assistant curator at Nashville’s Parthenon museum, one of the first things she did was look through the collections. Among paintings by American artists and memorabilia from the 1897 Centennial Exposition in Tennessee—the event for which the Parthenon was built—she found a random assortment of pre-Columbian pottery from Mexico.

The artifacts had almost no identifying information and Seymour knew almost nothing about them. But she knew they didn’t belong in a warehouse in Nashville.

“My first thought was, well, he’s going to be repatriated. You have to go home,” she said during a recent interview.

This goal led to an exhibition, “ Repatriation and its impact”, along with the discovery of the collection’s strange origins and even the quest to change the city’s statute. It all started with a tax deduction.

It was the 1960s, and Rich Montgomery says his father, an Oregon doctor, and some friends were looking for ways to reduce income taxes. Somehow they came up with the idea of ​​using museum donations for deductions. To acquire objects to donate, they sent college-aged Rich and his brother to Mexico in a Chevy Suburban that they had retrofitted for extra storage.

Rich had spent a year of high school in Mazatlán and was familiar with artifacts called Colima dogs—ceramic representations of small, chubby, hairless dogs that were often placed in tombs. As the name suggests, they are associated with the Colima region. This gave the Montgomery brothers a starting point.

“So we went straight to Colima and started asking about these items,” he said. “You would take these dirt roads and go up into the hills, down through the valleys and along the rivers, and you would get to these little pueblos and you would just ask for these things. People made these up and we bought them.

The pieces they purchased included figurines and ocarinas. They had little apparent value to local farmers – Montgomery said people considered them trash and were happy to sell them for a few pesos each. He also emphasizes that they did not try to smuggle them.

“At no point did we think or feel that we were doing anything illegal,” he said. “We would show these things to the Mexican authorities when we left the country, and these guys didn’t care about it at all. And when we came to the US, we would show it to the customs people here on this side. And the rules at that time were very clear. If it is an antique, it is more than 100 years old, there was no tax on it. Here we go.

Mexico already had laws in place at that time to prevent artifacts from leaving the country, but they were not uniformly enforced, said Javier Diaz de Leon, the Mexican consul general in Atlanta who has been working with Seymour on the repatriation. In the last years, people have become more aware of ethical issues around the maintenance of artifacts that were taken from other countries without proper authorization, said Diaz de Leon.

“It’s a greater awareness,” he said. “People are coming to us, they’re coming to us, all over the world, voluntarily saying, ‘I’ve got this. It arrived in our hands. .We think we belong to the Mexican people.’ And that’s the kind of transition that makes us very happy.”

The consul general has nothing but praise for Seymour.

When she began this effort two years ago, the Parthenon did not have a disaffiliation policy — the removal of an item from a collection. Meanwhile, Nashville’s charter required that the artifacts be treated as surplus property, which is typically redistributed within the metropolitan government or sold at auction. Seymour worked with council members on a decree to allow his return to Mexico. It was approved in May, but it was a one-time solution. Her next step is to review the statute.

In the meantime, she hopes the collection will find a more appropriate home at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, where it will fit into the institution’s mission.

“I hope they research them and display them,” she said.

Although she is sad to see the collection end, Seymour commissioned a 3-D printed model of a Colima dog that they can use to continue telling the story. Ultimately, she said repatriation is simply the right thing to do. In the Parthenon “it is not being used. It’s a waste.”

Montgomery has no idea how her father connected with the city’s Parthenon, which operates a small museum inside a full-scale replica of ancient Greek temple in Nashville’s Centennial Park. In any case, the museum now has 255 pre-Columbian pieces donated by Montgomery and someone called Edgar York, about whom Seymour knows even less.

This lack of information is part of the exhibition, which displays a selection of small ornaments, zoomorphic images, ceramic pots, musical instruments and hand tools from the collection, with only generic labels, whose exact origin is unknown. It notes that research carried out by students at Vanderbilt University in the 1990s raised questions about the authenticity of some pieces. A 2014 review determined they were “outside the mission of the Parthenon.”

Some people may have a discoverer’s attitude toward repatriation efforts, while others blame museums for retaining looted artifacts from other countries, so Seymour wanted to be very transparent.

“Museums are not evil institutions that try to keep people’s things away from them. We’re actually trying to figure out what to do,” she said.