A Mayan artifact is set to return to Mexico after being held by a Chicago family for nearly 40 years, the National Museum of Mexican Art announced Friday.
The artifact is a limestone frieze that depicts a likely male figure donning an elaborate headdress, loincloth and mask. It originally faced another figure, said a spokesperson for the Pilsen museum, where it’s been held in a vault since February.
Experts believe the panel, which measures nearly four feet in length, was once part of an architectural structure built by the Yucatán Maya peoples. It’s also only one half of the original frieze — the other part’s whereabouts remain unknown. It’s estimated to be from 500-900 A.D.
Representatives from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH, in Spanish) in Mexico City plan to remove it from its crate, evaluate the condition and formally accept it on Friday morning alongside Mexican government officials at an event at the National Museum of Mexican Art.
Museums all around the world are reckoning with the uneasy truth that some pieces might have been acquired through unethical practices, including the looting of archaeological sites.
How the frieze ended up in the United States is unclear. “While some of the auditors are settlers, there are often also cases where it is Mexican locals who are doing the looting,” said Claudia Brittenham, a professor of art at the University of Chicago who studies Mesoamerican works. Income inequality, she added, factors into how pieces might end up in galleries, too.
Chicago’s Mexican art museum never owned the piece. It was sitting in an estate before the family of late Chicago philanthropists Joseph and Jeanne Sullivan reached out to the museum’s board of directors for help late last year. The museum is facilitating the repatriation.
Jeanne and Joseph Sullivan were philanthropists who lived and worked in Chicago. Joseph owned Vigoro, the lawn care brand, and was described as dedicating “much of his time to human rights and the arts” by the Chicago Tribune when he died in 2006. Jeanne worked in psychiatric social work with a focus on alcohol and substance abuse, and died in 2023.
Cesáreo Moreno, the Pilsen museum’s chief curator and visual arts director, said that the museum reviewed the artifact’s provenance and was able to confirm that, before it belonged to the Sullivan family, it was the property of a private collector.
That private collector appears to have been Lester Wolfe, whose collection was written about briefly in a 1978 book by Karl Herbert Mayer titled “Mayan Monuments: Sculptures of Unknown Provenance.”
Wolfe was an inventor and benefactor of MIT until he died in 1983. He loaned the piece to the Brooklyn Museum from 1966 to 1977 before it was returned to him, according to Mayer’s book. It later ended up at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame in the late 70s. In 1988, it was displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Then, that same year, the artifact ended up in a Chicago gallerist’s shop, where the Sullivans purchased it and had it sent to their second home in New Mexico.
The Sullivan family declined to speak with a Sun-Times reporter. Moreno says he thinks the family is just trying to do the right thing by returning it.
The question of provenance has become more pressing in the past decade or so. International law hasn’t always protected pieces like the frieze.
At a 1970 UNESCO convention, several countries signed onto a treaty making the theft or looting of objects such as the frieze a crime.
However, the U.S. didn’t ratify the treaty until 1972, and didn’t enact it until January of 1983; therefore, by law, an artifact like the Mayan frieze was not legally considered stolen at the time it was purchased, agreed Moreno and Brittenham.
But Moreno said that, from the viewpoint of his Pilsen museum, the understanding of Mexican law is that anything created before Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1810 cannot be sold or moved out of Mexico.
“[It’s] a kind of complicated framework, but it is also a sort of thing that I think a lot of collectors were not necessarily aware of in the way that they might be now,” Brittenham said.
INAH has aided in the return of hundreds of archaeological artifacts to Mexico since UNESCO’s first International Day against Illicit Trafficking in Cultural Property in 2019. When the frieze arrived at the National Museum of Mexican Art earlier this year, curators there already had a relationship with the Mexico City institute.
“We do very similar work and have a very similar mission in terms of exhibiting and promoting Mexican art, culture and history,” Moreno said.
The arrival of the frieze has added to ongoing conversations about collection policies at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Moreno said. With more than 20,000 objects in the Pilsen museum’s collection, they can now afford to start “being a little picky” about the things they accept or reject, he added.
“It’s not about getting more,” he said. “So with that, and knowing everything that has been going on in the world of museums, certainly Greece and Egypt, they would love their things back … I would even go as far as to say that there are Native American nations and communities in the United States who want their stuff back.”
The Pilsen museum hopes to hold onto the frieze for “as long as [we] can” before it returns to Mexico permanently. They’ll use it as an educational tool for others to learn about repatriation.