Category: Conservation

From Viking Silver to Washington: Who Gets to Decide What Survives?

It has been an unusually revealing week for cultural heritage law.

In Iran, conservators are racing to stabilize historic buildings damaged during the war. In Denmark, a homeowner digging a new terrace discovered the largest known Viking Age silver hoard in the country. In Florida, federal investigators are beginning the daunting work of identifying more than 22,000 antiquities seized in an ongoing smuggling investigation. And in Washington, the physical fabric of national cultural institutions continues to be remade, from the demolished East Wing of the White House to the removal this week of Joel Shapiro’s Blue from the Kennedy Center.

These stories arise from very different legal settings. Together they offer a useful reminder of what cultural heritage protection actually requires: good rules, capable institutions, expertise, and enough time to act before something important disappears.

The most sobering story comes from Iran. Sarvy Geranpayeh reports in The Art Newspaper that Iranian heritage officials have recorded damage to 149 historic monuments across 18 provinces and 29 cities following the US-Israeli strikes that began in February. Among the damaged sites are the Golestan Palace in Tehran, the seventeenth-century Chehel Sotoun Palace in Isfahan, and part of the Trans-Iranian Railway, all associated with UNESCO World Heritage inscriptions.

At Golestan Palace, a team of specialists collects, sorts and codes shattered wooden and decorative fragments Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts

The details of the conservation work are especially striking. At Golestan Palace, specialists are collecting, sorting, and coding shattered wooden and decorative fragments. Damaged roofs are being repaired before autumn rain causes another round of harm. At Chehel Sotoun, crews have stabilized damaged sections and removed hazards. Specialists repaired the Trans-Iranian Railway quickly enough to restore operations. Iranian officials estimate damage to the heritage sector at about 7.5 trillion tomans, roughly $40 million at current exchange rates. This is the less glamorous side of cultural heritage protection.

Iranian officials have been communicating with UNESCO, the secretariat of the Hague Convention, and other international bodies. They are also compiling technical documentation for possible compensation claims and international legal proceedings. Farhad Azizi Zelani, Iran’s director general of national and world heritage sites, draws a broader lesson from the experience: international instruments need effective implementation and a rapid response when cultural property is threatened.

That is an important point for the broader law of armed-conflict heritage protection. A treaty supplies a framework. The resilience of cultural property also depends on institutions capable of using it.

Photo: North Jutland Museums / Nordjyske Museer

A very different story from Denmark: A homeowner in Rebild set out to build a terrace and instead found enough Viking silver to make archaeologists everywhere reconsider the attractions of yard work. The newly discovered hoard contains about 700 tenth-century objects and fragments weighing nearly 18.5 kilograms, including silver bars, bracelets, 47 whole coins and coin fragments, a small Thor’s hammer, and pieces of cut silver. The Art Newspaper reports on the discovery here, while Nordjyske Museer provides an excellent account of the find and its archaeological significance.

The objects reveal an economy tied to a very large world. The hoard contains both Arabic and Anglo-Saxon coins. Much of the silver was apparently valued by weight rather than by the identity of the object itself. The bars, broken jewelry, coins, and silver fragments offer evidence of trade networks linking Scandinavia with England and the Islamic world during a period when the Danish kingdom and Christianity in Scandinavia were taking shape.

The legal response is almost as interesting as the discovery. Under section 30 of the Danish Museum Act, objects from the past that possess valuable material or special cultural-historical significance can constitute danefæ, or treasure trove. Qualifying finds belong to the state and must be turned over to the National Museum. The finder receives compensation based on the material value and rarity of the objects and, importantly, “the level of care” used in securing the find. The National Museum of Denmark explains the reward system here.

That last factor matters. Denmark has built an incentive into the law for a finder to protect archaeological information rather than simply extract valuable objects from the ground. The Rebild finder realized he had encountered something significant, proceeded carefully, and the find entered an archaeological and museum system. The result preserves the objects and much of the knowledge they carry.Compare that sequence with what happens after antiquities have entered illicit commercial channels.

ICE Seizes 22,000 Antiquities in Florida

Hyperallergic reported this week on the extraordinary seizure of more than 22,000 artifacts by Homeland Security Investigations in Florida. HSI announced the seizure on August 28 and described it as among the largest in the agency’s history. Preliminary assessments suggest some of the objects are between 1,000 and 5,000 years old and originated in Europe, Africa, the Levant, and the eastern Mediterranean. Researchers from the University of South Florida and the University of Pennsylvania are assisting with identification, authentication, and conservation.

At this stage, there is still a great deal we do not know. Authorities have said little publicly about the suspected trafficking network, the provenance of individual objects, possible source countries, or eventual repatriations. With 22,000 objects, sorting those questions will take considerable time.

This is the recurring difficulty with antiquities enforcement. Recovery gets the object back into responsible custody. Archaeological context may already have vanished. Investigators and scholars then have to reconstruct histories of excavation, ownership, export, and import from whatever evidence remains.

The institutional juxtaposition identified by Hyperallergic is also difficult to miss. HSI has developed considerable expertise in cultural-property investigations and repatriations. Elsewhere within the Department of Homeland Security, border construction has recently damaged the Las Playas Intaglio archaeological site in Arizona, while preservation and environmental requirements have been waived for other border projects that may affect archaeological resources. Somehow, one federal department can simultaneously contain sophisticated cultural-property enforcement and activities that put cultural resources at risk.

Which brings us to Washington D.C. The East Wing of the White House was demolished between October and December 2025 as part of the project to construct a new East Wing containing a ballroom and underground military facilities. Adam Gopnik’s essay on the demolition in The New Yorker remains one of the better pieces of writing about why the loss generated such a strong response. His central insight is that architecture carries political meaning. The White House accumulated meaning because presidents inherited it temporarily. Alterations to a building like this therefore implicate process, stewardship, and institutional continuity as well as architectural taste.

There is an especially revealing legal wrinkle now. On August 31, the Supreme Court divided 5–4 in National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation and stayed a lower-court injunction that had restricted above-ground construction. The Court’s per curiam opinion emphasized standing. It concluded that the government was likely to succeed in showing that the National Trust lacked a sufficiently concrete and particularized injury to challenge the project and that the remaining stay factors favored the government. The Court expressly said that it was not deciding the legality of the East Wing project itself. The Court’s opinion is available here.

Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, dissented. His opening conclusion was unusually direct: “That construction is likely unlawful.” Roberts pointed to 40 U.S.C. § 8106, which prohibits construction of a building or structure on federal public grounds in the District of Columbia without express congressional authority. In his view, Congress had supplied no such authority for the ballroom project.

The standing dispute may prove important for preservation law well beyond this particular building. Historic-preservation organizations often rely on members whose use and enjoyment of historic places supply the injury necessary to get into federal court. A rule that treats an architectural or historic injury largely as disagreement with government aesthetics could make some preservation challenges considerably harder to bring. There is also a simpler lesson here. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, the East Wing was already gone. Preservation law has always struggled with remedies because demolition can happen quickly.

Another removal in Washington this week raises a related set of questions. On Wednesday, September 2, National Park Service crews dismantled Joel Shapiro’s Blue, the 24-foot painted-aluminum sculpture installed at the Kennedy Center’s REACH campus in 2019. Shapiro had described the animated, angular figure as a “celebration of possibility.” He gifted the sculpture to the Kennedy Center as a permanent installation. The Washington Post’s reporting on the removal is particularly useful, as is Hyperallergic’s account of the deinstallation.

Critics Slam “Petty” Removal of Joel Shapiro Sculpture From Kennedy Center

The Kennedy Center offered no advance public explanation for the decision. It said that the Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation would decide where the sculpture is installed next. Former Kennedy Center curator Josef Palermo gave the Post a more pointed account. He said he had previously been instructed to “get rid” of outdoor artwork because President Trump wanted an entirely new collection when the Center reopened after renovations. Palermo did not recall Blue being singled out individually.

The photographs of the sculpture being taken apart invite a moral-rights question, and I may return to that issue in a separate post.

There is an important wrinkle at the outset. Shapiro died on June 14, 2025. For a work of visual art created after the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) took effect, 17 U.S.C. § 106A provides that the federal rights of attribution and integrity last for the life of the author, with the statutory term running through the end of the calendar year in which it otherwise expires. Shapiro’s VARA rights therefore expired at the end of 2025, months before Blue was removed.

That makes Blue a potentially useful case study in the limits of American moral rights. Had Shapiro still been alive, the facts would invite questions about destruction or modification, removal from a site for which a work was given as a “permanent installation,” and the uneasy treatment of site-specific art under VARA. The First Circuit’s decision in Phillips v. Pembroke Real Estate—which of course does not bind courts in Washington—famously concluded that VARA does not protect site-specific art as such. Those questions deserve more space than I can give them here.

For now, the larger pattern is enough. Cultural heritage law is sometimes treated as a field concerned with old things: temples, archaeological sites, ancient coins, museum collections, historic buildings. Yet heritage becomes vulnerable in the present. The differences among these stories matter. So does the common question beneath them: who gets to decide what survives, and through what process?

Good heritage law creates time for expertise before an irreversible decision. It records what has been found and what has been lost. It creates incentives for responsible behavior. It gives institutions the authority and resources to conserve. And, at its best, it recognizes that stewardship carries obligations to people who will encounter these places and objects long after the present decision-makers are gone. Once the bulldozers arrive, or an archaeological context has been scattered, the law has considerably less to work with.

Sources and Further Reading

The Kennedy Center: The name on the front and the Art Inside

File:Kennedy Bust Performing Arts.jpg
Bust of John F. Kennedy by Robert Berks at the “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts”, Washington D.C., USA.

The recent Kennedy Center controversy has mostly been told as a story about a name. That is understandable. A national cultural institution created as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy was, for a time, refashioned into another surface for presidential branding. The litigation over that move has now produced an important result: a federal judge has ruled that the Center cannot be renamed without Congress, and the institution has been ordered to remove references to “Trump Kennedy Center” from its official materials and signage.

But the more revealing heritage story may not be the name on the front of the building. It may be what was happening inside.

Josef Palermo, the Kennedy Center’s former curator of visual arts and special programming, has described a chaotic year inside the institution: artist cancellations, shrinking audiences, staff firings, leadership turnover, and a political takeover grafted onto an institution that had long served as one of the nation’s central cultural stages. His account is especially striking because Palermo was responsible for the artworks in the building. Shortly after the announcement of a planned two-year closure, Palermo says Richard Grenell instructed him to “get rid of everything” in the permanent collection because new art would be needed after the reopening. Palermo says that if donors did not want to pay for the removal of works, they could be auctioned or given away.

That allegation is not a theft. It should not be described as one. But it may be something nearly as revealing: administrative looting applied to America’s cultural heritage.

The Kennedy Center is not simply a theater complex. Since its opening in 1971, it has also functioned as a site of cultural diplomacy. Palermo’s account lays out the quieter history of the Center’s rooms. The Israeli Lounge, the Chinese Lounge, the Circles Lounge (formerly the Russian Lounge until the invasion of Ukraine), and the African Room were not just donor hospitality spaces. They were material expressions of international relationships, memory, and diplomacy. The Israeli Lounge, Palermo notes, was decorated with support from the Israeli government as a gift to the American people and in tribute to President Kennedy, celebrating the connection between Judaism and music. Other rooms similarly gave physical form to the Kennedy Center’s role as a venue where culture, diplomacy, and national memory overlapped.

That is what makes the reported treatment of those spaces so troubling. Palermo describes a sudden decision to sell sponsorships of the Center’s lounges. The Circles Lounge became the SyberJet Lounge. The African Room was transformed into “A Tribute to America’s Intelligence Community.” Among the items taken down from the former African Room were handmade textiles, a wooden sculpture donated by Ghana to represent African grief after Kennedy’s assassination, and carved doors made from centuries-old wood depicting Yoruba village scenes.

In 1973, the Nigerian carver Lamidi Olonade Fakeye was commissioned by the Nations of Africa to carve a pair of doors and transom that would then be given as a gift to John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to be installed into the African Lounge. The doors were made from the wood of a single, 700 year old tree and depict Yoruban village scenes.http://www.schuettinger.com/kennedy-center-african-lounge-doors-and-transom.html

Those carved doors deserve more than a passing reference. In 1973, the Nigerian carver Lamidi Olonade Fakeye was commissioned by the Nations of Africa to carve a pair of doors and a transom as a gift to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to be installed in the African Lounge. The doors were made from the wood of a single 700-year-old tree and depict Yoruba village scenes. They were not just decorations. They were a material act of cultural diplomacy, made for a specific place, with a specific commemorative purpose.

A current Kennedy Center staffer told The Atlantic that these objects were placed in the building’s archives for safekeeping during construction. That may prove true. It may also be that the works are carefully inventoried, preserved, and returned to meaningful public display. But the episode still reveals a deep failure of care: diplomatic rooms became naming opportunities, and cultural objects became obstacles to grift.

The legal case over the name gives the controversy a useful constitutional and statutory frame. Representative Joyce Beatty, an ex officio trustee of the Kennedy Center, challenged the attempted renaming, arguing that Congress named the institution and that the board could not unilaterally attach Trump’s name to it. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper agreed that the name change was unauthorized without congressional action and ordered the removal of Trump’s name from official materials and signage. The court also preliminarily blocked the board’s planned two-year closure, while making clear that needed capital repair work could continue and that the board could revisit closure only after a proper, prudent decision-making process. So the formal legal holding is not about the art collection. It is about statutory authority, governance, and the limits of a board’s power. But those are precisely the issues that matter for cultural-object stewardship. Who has authority over public cultural institutions? What duties follow from that authority? And what happens when trusteeship is treated as a political prize rather than a public trust?

The temptation is to reach for the most dramatic analogies: Nazi looting, wartime plunder, occupied museums. But that is not quite right here. The Kennedy Center is not Kherson, and Washington is not an occupied city. No invading army packed paintings into trucks. The better comparison is not armed conflict but institutional capture.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government, until its recent defeat, offered a contemporary model of how cultural life can be reshaped without soldiers or bonfires. Cultural institutions can be redirected through appointments, funding, foundations, grant-making, and ideological management. Museums, theaters, universities, and arts bodies do not need to be destroyed to be controlled. They can be made to understand which histories, artists, and institutions will receive support, and which will be shunned.

Turkey offers another version of the same pattern. Recent changes there have raised concerns that the central government can seize historic properties from local authorities, including opposition-run cultural sites in Istanbul. Again, the issue is not battlefield plunder. It is a legal and administrative machinery that turns heritage into a lever of political control.

The same pattern is visible in the administration’s treatment of the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian is not just another museum network. It is the country’s great national cultural institution: a sprawling public trust of museums, research centers, collections, archives, and the National Zoo. Yet the administration’s March 2025 executive order treated it less as an independent cultural and scholarly institution than as a messaging problem to be corrected. The order directed Vice President J.D. Vance, in his role as a Smithsonian Regent, to work to remove “improper ideology” from Smithsonian museums and programs. It also directed Vance and the Office of Management and Budget to work with Congress to condition future appropriations so that federal funds would not support exhibits or programs deemed inconsistent with the administration’s preferred account of American history. That is an effort to make the nation’s cultural memory bend toward the uses of the party in power.

The broader danger is not only that art might be lost, damaged, auctioned, or hidden away. The danger is that a public cultural institution can be treated as a trophy of political victory. Rename the building. Purge the leadership and call it renovation.

None of this requires calling the Kennedy Center episode a theft. The more precise word is capture. Or perhaps administrative looting: the use of lawful-looking authority to strip an institution of its independence, expertise, history, and public purpose.

The Kennedy Center story matters because it shows how cultural heritage can be damaged in stages. First the name changes. Then the staff changes. Then the donors change. Then the rooms change. Then the objects come down. By the time anyone asks where the collection went, the institution may already have been remade.

I do not want to live in a country where public cultural institutions become trophies of political victory. I want to live in a republic, where museums, monuments, theaters, archives, and collections are held in trust for the public, not redecorated to flatter whoever happens to hold power. My family did not send men to Europe in World War II so that, eighty years later, public institutions could be treated as ornaments for a strongman’s vanity. That is not the republic they fought for. And it is not the republic we should accept: a republic cannot preserve its heritage if every public institution is available for capture by the next man who wants his name on every building.

Bibliography

Josef Palermo, “What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center ($),” The Atlantic (Apr. 16, 2026).

Beatty v. Trump, No. 25-cv-4480, Memorandum Opinion (D.D.C. May 29, 2026).

Steven Sloan & Meg Kinnard, “Kennedy Center moves to erase Trump references after judge said they were illegally added,” Associated Press (June 4, 2026).

Andrew Chung, “Kennedy Center to remove Trump name after court decision,” Reuters (June 5, 2026).

Schuettinger Conservation Services, “Kennedy Center African Lounge Doors and Transom.”

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, “African Lounge.”

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, “The Kennedy Center: A Historical and Artistic Tour,” Google Arts & Culture.

Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” The White House (Mar. 27, 2025).

Veronika Molnar, “Dismantling Orbán’s 16-Year Grip on Hungary’s Art World,” Hyperallergic (Apr. 17, 2026).

Artistic Freedom Initiative, “Systematic Suppression: Hungary’s Arts & Culture in Crisis,” Jan. 2026.

Richard Unwin, “‘The extremely happy part of the crowd’: Hungarian arts figures hope for change after 16 years of Orbán rule,” The Art Newspaper (Apr. 16, 2026).

Ayla Jean Yackley, “Turkey’s heritage power grab: new law threatens Istanbul’s opposition-run cultural sites,” The Art Newspaper (Feb. 20, 2026).

Mural in Houston’s 3rd Ward at Risk

 

This mural, “Contribution of Negro Women to American Life and Education”, finished by John Biggers in 1953 is at risk.

Natural disasters pose many risks to works of art, but one of the saddest is the damage done to works of art at cultural organizations that may go unnoticed. In Houston’s Third Ward, the Blue Triangle YWCA has served black women and girls for decades. The building includes a gym, kitchen, meeting rooms, and an indoor pool. Unfortunately the building itself has needed repairs for many years. In 2016 the Houston Chronicle reported that the organization was raising funds to repair the roof. But the torrential rainfall of Hurricane Harvey in August of 2017 finally caused serious damage to an important mural.

The Blue Triangle building, a state historic landmark.

That mural created by John Biggers, “Contribution of Negro Women to American Life and Education”. The mural, completed in 1953, was commissioned by a local Pastor and was one of Biggers most important early murals. Biggers was an important figure in Houston’s arts community. He was recruited to what was then known as the Texas State University (now Texas Southern) for Negroes in 1949 as the first director of its Art department. Ileana Najarro reported for the Houston Chronicle that:

 

The mural, which served as Biggers’ doctoral dissertation and features images of abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and poet Phillis Wheatley, was an opportunity to recognize these women’s work.

“He told me that he wanted to give [it] as a tribute to the Negro women,” Bryant said.

To Robert Proctor, co-director and chief painting conservator for Whitten & Proctor Fine Art Conservation in Houston, the mural exemplifies Biggers’ “compositional ability to work across large space.”

Proctor, who has restored other Biggers’ paintings, noted that the artist’s unique brushstrokes and his attention to work surfaces make them some of the most difficult pieces of art to restore.

Unfortunately the leak in the roof has imperiled the mural, damaging the mural itself and causing black mold to set in.

A section of the mural that was damaged by mold.

The work has been treated to prevent further mold, but further work cannot be undertaken until the roof of the building is repaired. The Houston Endowment has offered an initial $258,000 to repair the roof, but more funds are needed.

Repairs to historic John Biggers mural on hold, roof repair funds needed – HoustonChronicle.com (Nov. 10, 2018), https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Repairs-to-historic-John-Biggers-mural-on-hold-13406397.php.
Biggers mural now subject of online fundraiser – HoustonChronicle.com (Jan. 2016), https://www.chron.com/about/article/Biggers-mural-now-subject-of-GoFundMe-online-6784605.php.
Interested donors reach out to save endangered Biggers mural – HoustonChronicle.com (Jan., 2016), https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Interested-donors-reach-out-to-save-endangered-6777606.php.
Holland Cotter, John Biggers, 76, Painter Who Explored African Life, The New York Times, Jan. 30, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/arts/john-biggers-76-painter-who-explored-african-life.html.

Trump administration trades heritage for short term gain

Sites like the Cedar Mesa Ruins in Bears Ears National Monument are at risk with the proposed reduction in the national monument

Conservation is not a conservative principle anymore. Today President Trump signed presidential proclamations that will take the unprecedented step of dramatically shrinking two national monuments in Utah. The moves are largely seen as favors to Senator Orin Hatch, a frequent Trump apologist. This part of the American West frequently suffers from antiquities looting on the part of local residents, and the designation of these monuments was an important step to reduce the destruction and looting of these sites. A step that the Trump administration now is attempting to undo.

The reductions in these national monuments are a seldom-used step, one few other presidents have considered since the Antiquities Act was created in 1906. The New York Times reported that reductions have occurred before—Woodrow Wilson reduced the size of Mount Olympus, and Franklin Roosevelt reduced the size of the Grand Canyon monument.

Trump’s attempted reduction in size is not yet known, and will have to survive likely legal challenges, but mark an unfortunate step away from preservation of natural and cultural heritage. Instead the short-sighted move seems to prioritize development, mineral extraction, and ranching. Tribal groups are likely to be impacted most directly, and as a result some have already announced plans to challenge the reduction in court. The Navajo Nation in a statement declared:

The decision to reduce the size of the [Bears Ears] Monument is being made with no tribal consultation. The Navajo Nation will defend Bear Ears . . . . The reduction in the size of the Monument leaves us no choice but to litigate this decision.

 

Obama could still save Bears Ears

Cedar Mesa, one of the estimated 100,000 archaeological sites in the proposed Bears Ears monument
Cedar Mesa, one of the estimated 100,000 archaeological sites in the proposed Bears Ears monument

Former Senator and U.S. Representative Mark Udall argues President Obama could still set aside the “Bears Ears” National Monument:

The president has a rare opportunity to advance this proud tradition by protecting a spectacular area critical to our western heritage: Bears Ears, a 1.9 million-acre area in southern Utah replete with thousands of historic and cultural sites.

President Obama has already demonstrated his commitment to preserving and protecting unique public treasures for generations to come. He did so with Chimney Rock in southwest Colorado and again with Browns Canyon in Chaffee County. I was proud to champion both bipartisan efforts to protect these landscapes for future generations.

The president now has the chance to preserve lands vital to our nation’s heritage and history with the support of five Native American tribes whose heritage is memorialized in this area. He should utilize the Antiquities Act to protect the Bears Ears region in southeast Utah — a site that represents our western pioneering history and that of the tribal communities across the region, including the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.

Numerous Native American tribes trace their roots to Bears Ears. In fact, the strongest voices in favor of a designation have come from the Ute Mountain Ute, Hopi, Navajo, Uintah and Ouray Ute, and Zuni tribes. The site also is home to artifacts from pioneers who made a home in the American West.

One of the prominent natural features in the landscape is Jacob’s Chair, named after my great-great grandfather, Jacob Hamlin, who was known as the Mormon Pathfinder. Hamlin spent his life working tirelessly to resolve conflicts that arose between the newly arrived settlers and the deeply rooted Native American tribes and bands already living in the area. His vision encompassed a future where both groups lived and worked together collaboratively, respecting each other’s traditions and beliefs, and living in harmony with the land. A Bears Ears National Monument would be a 21st century investment in that vision.

  1. Mark Udall, Still time for President Obama to save Bears Ears, The Denver Post (Nov. 20, 2016).