Nashville Parthenon Museum returns, repatriates Mexican artifacts, art

The Parthenon Museum in Nashville is repatriating its prized collection of 500-year-old artifacts back to Mexico, saying it's the right thing to do.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — This city's renowned Parthenon Museum is bidding farewell to one of its prized collections: This month over 250 Mexican artifacts — including ancient tools, instruments and clay sculptures dating back more than 500 years — are being returned to Mexico City, where they will eventually be put on display.

The prized artifacts have been at the Parthenon since the late 1960s, when an Oregon doctor donated them for tax deduction purposes. Farmers in western Mexico had sold them for cheap, thinking they were junk found on their farms.

“Mexico has had a lot of their history removed in this way,” said Bonnie Seymour, the assistant curator who led the museum’s repatriation effort.

“It’s just the responsibility of all museums to return that," she said at a celebration to mark the repatriation, where traditional dances and other cultural touchstones honored Mexico's history. "We can’t fix the holes that are lost, because a lot of context is lost. But we can give it back to where it belongs.”

A clay sculpture of a Mexican hairless dog — one of the 250 artifacts in the Parthenon's collection.Jackie MontalvoSeymour introduced the artifacts to visitors one last time as part of “Repatriation and its Impact,” an exhibition exploring the global debate around repatriation. The exhibit’s walls detail famous repatriation cases, including the Parthenon’s namesake in Athens, Greece, where politicians continue to call on the British Museum to return ancient sculptures stolen two centuries ago.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/nashville-parthenon-museum-returns-mexican-artifacts-rcna163296

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