The Clarence and Anne Dillon Dunwalke Lecture

Provenance refers to an artwork’s history of ownership, from the time of its creation or archaeological discovery to the present. Provenance researchers track down a wide range of sources—scholarship, auction catalogs, financial records, inventories, correspondence, photographs, markings on artworks themselves, and more—to reconstruct an object’s past and retrace its path to the museum. This work has been compared to that of an investigator, and provenance researchers routinely described as “art detectives.” Over the past decade, these metaphors have become increasingly relevant as law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. have arrested dealers, seized antiquities from the nation’s leading museums, and made hundreds of repatriations to countries around the world—all to great fanfare and press coverage. The collision between the worlds of law enforcement and museums has revolutionized the field of provenance research and redefined the standards of ethical and legal collecting in this country. As a former Antiquities Trafficking Analyst for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and now the Provenance Research Specialist at the Worcester Art Museum, I will share stories from the frontlines of provenance research—stories of looting, forgery, and repatriation—that explain why museums need “art detectives” now more than ever.