SAIC Galleries - Graduate Exhibition May 2024 - Documentation by Jonas Mueller-Ahlheim
The Right to Look / The Right to Have
On January 12, 2024 an amendment to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) went into effect requiring museums to obtain consent from tribes before exhibiting objects connected to their heritage. Since then, I have been documenting the Field Museum’s response to these updated federal regulations and the subsequent response of museum visitors. In the Ancient Americas and Hall of the Northwest Coast and Arctic Peoples exhibits, some vitrines are covered from the outside with brown paper and blue tape, while others were veiled by thin black curtains held closed with office clips, the illuminated display cases glowing through the thin fabric. Holes appear regularly in the paper and tape as visitors tear and peel to see what is behind the covered glass. Office clips collect on the floor below the curtains as people peek through the narrow panels of fabric to look at the remaining items in the glowing cases. Signage throughout the winding exhibits explain the coverings, although the document sized paper signs scotch taped to the vitrines are often also subject to tearing. These temporary coverings have become sites of a different display–a record of an insistence upon the right to look, provoked by the make shift coverings offered by the museum while they wait for Tribes to decide what the institution has the right to have. I recognize this insistence upon looking and having as my own heritage to contend with as a descendant of early english settlers in the northeast.
These images are part of an evolving collaboration with Selena Kearney.
