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

When Bonnie Seymour took a job as assistant curator of Nashville's Parthenon museum, one of the first things she did was to look through the collections. Among paintings by American artists and memorabilia from Tennessee’s 1897 Centennial Exposition — 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 next to nothing about them. But she knew they did not belong in a Nashville storage room.

“My first thought was, well, it’s going to get repatriated. It's got to go home,” she said during a recent interview.

That goal led to an exhibit, “ Repatriation and Its Impact," along with the discovery of the collection's strange origins, and even a quest to change the city's charter. It all started with a tax deduction.

Colima dogs

It was the 1960s and Rich Montgomery says his father, an Oregon doctor, and some friends were looking for ways to lower their income taxes. Somehow they came upon the idea of using museum donations for deductions. In order to acquire objects to donate, they sent a college-aged Rich and his brother to Mexico in a Chevy Suburban they had tricked out for extra storage.

Rich had spent a year of high school in Mazatlan and was familiar with artifacts called Colima dogs — pottery representations of small, chubby hairless dogs that were often placed in tombs. As the name implies, they are associated with the Colima region. That gave the Montgomery brothers a place to start.

“So we we headed straight into Colima and we started asking about these items," he said. “You’d get on these dirt roads and wander up into the hills, and down into the valleys, and along the rivers, and come to these little pueblos and just ask around for this stuff. People would come up with it, and we would buy them.”

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

“At no point did we ever think or feel that we’re doing anything illegal,” he said. “We would show this stuff to the Mexican authorities as we left the country, and those guys could care less about it. And when we came into the US, we would show it to the customs people here on this side. And the rules back then were very clear. If it’s an antique, it's over 100 years old, there was no duty on it. Off we'd go.”

Repatriation

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

“It’s a greater conscience," he said. “People come to us, are coming to us, all over the world, voluntarily saying, ‘I got this. It came to our hands. But we don’t think we should have it. We think we belongs to the Mexican people.’ And that is the sort of transition that we are very happy about.”

The consul general has nothing but praise for Seymour.

When she began this effort two years ago, the Parthenon had no policy for deaccession — removing an item from a collection. Meanwhile, Nashville's charter required the artifacts to be treated as surplus property, which is normally either redistributed within Metro government or sold at auction. Seymour worked with council members on an ordinance to allow their return to Mexico. It was approved in May, but it was a one-time fix. Her next step is to revise the charter.

Meanwhile, 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.

“Hopefully, they’re going to research them and put them on display,” she said.

While she is sad to see the collection go, Seymour has commissioned a 3-D printed model of a Colima dog they can use to continue to tell the story. Ultimately, she said repatriation is simply the right thing to do. At the Parthenon “it’s not being utilized. It’s a waste.”

“Outside the Parthenon's mission”

Montgomery has no idea how his father got connected with the city's Parthenon, which operates a small museum inside a full-scale replica of the ancient Greek temple in Nashville's Centennial Park. However it happened, the museum now has 255 pre-Columbian pieces donated by Montgomery and someone named Edgar York, whom Seymour knows even less about.

That lack of information is part of the point in the exhibit, which displays a selection of the collection's small adornments, zoomorphic images, ceramic pots, musical instruments and hand tools with only generic labels, their exact provenance unknown. It notes that research by Vanderbilt University students in the 1990s raised questions about the authenticity of some pieces. A 2014 review determined they were “outside the Parthenon's mission.”

Some people can have a finders-keepers attitude toward repatriation efforts, while others blame museums for holding onto artifacts looted from other countries, so Seymour wanted to be very transparent.

“Museums aren’t evil institutions trying to keep people’s stuff away from them. We are actually trying to figure out what to do,” she said.