Amy Jayasuriya ’26 and Ishita Jayadev ’26
Editors-in-Chief
In fall 2023, Mara Halpern ’25, an ex-Ruth Chandler Williamson RCW (RCW) intern, was led to believe that they were cataloging items and later doing research for their thesis within the presence of a mummy in Scripps’ collection storage space for three semesters.
This ended up being untrue. When RCW staff chose to investigate the “mummy” in December 2024 after Halpern asked for it to be looked into multiple times, they realized that what they had believed was a body for over 40 years was in fact a crumbling Buddhist statue.
Despite the relieving results, Halpern found this experience emblematic of larger issues in the RCW’s collection. Four months later, an autonomous group of students created a petition listing items of concern in the RCW — including human remains — and demanding more funding for the RCW so that they can hire external experts to provenance (determine the origin of) and repatriate these objects while also disclosing the process to the student body.
While the petition only lists objects that are catalogued on the official RCW website, Halpern, who was not rehired in the fall 2024 semester, expressed broader concern about items that are not officially part of the RCW’s holdings.
The 5Cs used to have a shared collection before each school built their own galleries in the 1990s. Due to this, many objects that no school has claimed ownership of are still being stored at Scripps.
Halpern saw the legacy of decades of neglect of these parts of the collection through their experiences in the storage space.
“Our job [as interns] was to try to sort the collection … they were basically trying to clean up this decades-long mess that’s been created by all the neglect,” they said. “For over a year, RCW staff comfortably told me that there was a human body in the [storage space]. They showed me and my coworkers what they said was a body, sitting in an open cardboard box, covered in dust, on top of a filing cabinet, like it was no big deal. At one point, one staff member said it might be ‘South American and sacrificial.’ It took them until this December to realize it was a statue — that is the level of disarray and carelessness we are talking about here.”
Once the staff identified the “body” as a statue, Curtis told Halpern that finding a safer way to house the object was no longer a priority — despite its deteriorating state. Halpern clarified that, to their knowledge, the statue is still sitting in the basement.
The student petition is divided into three demands: items on the website that need expert evaluation as well as increased funding for RCW staff to complete these evaluations; items on the website that need to be repatriated and returned, and explicit, written acknowledgement of the presence and status of human remains and potentially looted objects; as well as the disclosure of collection repatriation efforts to the 7C community.
The petition lists and links items that are recorded and published on the RCW website, calling for external evaluation to determine their origin. The objects include unprovenanced Native objects and all items listed on the RCW website that are under “Africa anonymous.” Other items that need to be repatriated include a “Tibetan skull cap” or a kapala — a ceremonial object used in Buddhist rituals as well as likely looted, broken Buddha sculptures from Cambodia, Thailand, and China.
The current director of the RCW, Erin Curtis, spoke to each of these items and explained the repatriation efforts the RCW is currently engaging in.
Curtis identified the “Tibetan skull cap,” as human remains and agreed that the “Broken Buddha sculptures from Cambodia, Thailand, and China,” were likely looted.
Curtis explained that the Tibetan skull cap was originally acquired by Scripps in 2010 from Ralph Riffenburg, an ophthalmologist who lived in Pomona and donated a significant amount of Asian art to Scripps and other museums.
“I learned about this piece last year,” Curtis said. “I was concerned about the fact that we did have the presence of a particular ceremonial object and human remains from Tibetan culture. I asked us to stop teaching it out of respect. Or if we were to teach it, it has to go to a very particular [angle] in which we are framing the context for this object and the concerns about having a piece that is human remains here at Scripps.”
Curtis also highlighted this item as a potential object for repatriation in the future. However, she identified issues in pursuing repatriation for this specific object from Tibet.
“The problem with repatriating objects to Tibet is that Tibet for a long time has been under the control of the Chinese government [and is] essentially an occupied territory of China,” she said. “You have to go through the Chinese government right now and they have a history of destroying Tibetan cultural objects.”
“What we are in the process of identifying is [that] I have come into some awareness of different organizations that sort collect and try to provide safe and respectful housing for Tibetan objects to bring them back together until such time as they could be safely returned to Tibet and then they take that on,” Curtis said. “I think that is our next route. But that is gonna require some research [and] outreach.”
However, Halpern clarified that in fall 2024, one of the RCW staff members told them that the skullcap had recently been used in a class.
“I was told that Iast year, the skull cap was taken out of [storage] and used for educational purposes in a class,” they said. “If the RCW has flagged this object as human remains in need for repatriation, why is it still being handled as an educational resource for students? Why did they have it sitting in a used cardboard box in the [storage space]?”
In reference to the broken Buddha sculptures, Curtis said, “it notes in the petition that these are likely looted. That’s absolutely the case. We know if we see just a Buddha head or a piece of a Buddha, that is probably looted because within Buddhism, the idea is to represent the full figure of the Buddha. So that’s an issue.”
As for steps Curtis has taken for these sculptures, she noted that she was in communication with a visiting Scripps professor who is a Vietnamese and Cambodian American artist, Phùng Huynh. Huynh has been creating a series of drawings on Buddha heads in museum collections throughout LA. Curtis said that she had invited Huynh to review the sculptures at the RCW and include them in her series, potentially displaying them at a future exhibition while simultaneously pursuing repatriation efforts.
“The goal here is really to lead with transparency and to call attention to issues like this in the collection,” Curtis said. “So I have people I can consult about how to get them repatriated, have an exhibition that calls attention to that ethical concern within our collections, and also highlight the work of this particular Asian American artist.”
However, she acknowledged that these steps were not complete and in conjunction with a larger project of getting the sculptures repatriated.
In regard to the specific Native American objects that the petition demands the “thorough evaluation by external experts to clarify provenance and determine potential for repatriation” for, Curtis clarified that these objects had been reviewed in 1993, when the RCW first opened.
“Scripps came into compliance with NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) and to do that we had to have tribal representatives and experts come and review all of the native objects in the collection [to] help determine provenance,” Curtis said.
“And then we had to notify any tribes that were able to be identified in relation to those works that we had their objects. That being said, that’s now 35 years ago. So for me, that suggests that this is an area worth revisiting, perhaps reopening those conversations, but with a number of things to be tackled and a small staff and limited resources, it’s difficult.”
She also specified that the other objects the petition demanded external evaluations for, such as the objects listed under “African Anonymous,” had also been reviewed by Robert Selsa, a historian specializing in West African art during the 1990s. She explained that Selsa had determined that the West African objects in the collection were mass produced, largely created for commercial tourist trade, and therefore difficult to track the original artist.
Due to this, Curtis said, “Repatriation is really important work and a big deal, but getting it right is an even bigger deal … Our ownership of those works would not present a particular ethical concern. It does present a concern in terms of how we teach with those works [which] is something I’ve already talked about with my staff.”
Curtis emphasized that these efforts were not just spurred by the petition and have been ongoing since her arrival at Scripps in July 2023.
As soon as Curtis began working at the college, she instituted an indefinite acquisitions pause — meaning that the RCW will still evaluate and consider donations brought to them but are not actively working to acquire new objects.
“This is to give me time to learn the collections, to give my staff time and space to move other collections related work forward, because processing new acquisitions takes a lot of time and energy,” she said. “It allows us to do a thorough assessment of our collection storage spaces and management practices.
I’ve been working with the staff to identify what I would call areas of concern in the collection.”
While all of this work has been happening for the past two years, Curtis said that the process of assessing and repatriating current items would take many more years to complete and the RCW would need more staff and a larger budget than it currently has to continue it.
“Our operating budget is very, very small. It’s about $18,000 and that has not been increased [since the RCW opened in 1993]. We also have a very small staff,” Curtis said, referring to the RCW’s six person staff.
Halpern also expressed sympathy with the under-resourced RCW workers. “Staff have consistently expressed that the RCW is underfunded and understaffed. From what I understand, they do not have the means to appropriately address the collections issues in a timely manner, even if they did everything in their power.”
However, Curtis emphasized how RCW staff are looking to apply to external grants to get more funding to continue this work.
“The issue that we now face is that one of the major granting organizations in the country, the IMLS, which is the Institute for Museum and Library Services, was dissolved in a Trump executive order,” Curtis said. “So we can’t access those kinds of grants. That doesn’t mean we stop this work or that that’s an excuse. We look for other granting sources. We continue to move the work forward, but it does affect the pacing and time [of it].”
While Curtis acknowledged the limitations that the RCW has to contend with, she disagreed with the wording of the petition which demanded for the “explicit, written acknowledgement of the long term mismanagement of parts of the collection.”
“I don’t believe that this collection has been chronically mismanaged in the time that it has been at Scripps,” she said. “I think that it is a small team doing the best that they can with the resources that they have had for a long time … How we think about has shifted drastically in the time that the RCW has existed. So I believe that the staff was operating according to their understanding of best practices.”
In regards to objects in Scripps’ storage, Curtis confirmed that the RCW staff who reviewed the storage collection “[had] enough baseline expertise to be able to identify whether there would be Native objects or other objects that might be sensitive.”
Due to this preliminary review, Curtis said that to her understanding there were no Native American “sensitive objects” in the storage space. However, she confirmed that because these items are not officially owned by Scripps, they have not been reviewed by external consultants and do not fall into compliance with NAGPRA.
Curtis specified that because many of the items in the storage space are owned by other colleges, it’s difficult to have each item reviewed and repatriated. However, Halpern clarified that a number of the objects that reside in the storage space haven’t been claimed by any of the five schools.
“There are objects in Scripps storage that are not in the RCW’s records,” Halpern said. “These are objects that staff think might belong to Mudd or Pomona or TCCS, but have been stored on Scripps campus for decades. No one seems to want to take responsibility for safely housing, researching, and returning objects that are not officially Scripps’ property [and] none of the other institutions claim them.”
Despite these difficulties in working with objects in the RCW storage space, there have been examples of successful repatriation. In December 2024, the gallery repatriated 114 works of glassware that belonged to Harvey Mudd but were being housed at Scripps with the help of two Ruth Chandler Williamson RCW staff.
“In the 2010s, Harvey Mudd College initiated a repatriation process with the Cypriot government that stalled during the pandemic. HMC resumed the process, and last December, art handlers and representatives from the Cypriot government arrived in Claremont to pick up the work. John Trendler [Curator of Visual Resources] and T. Pacini [RCW Installer] worked with the art shippers and the representatives from Cyprus Department of Antiquities, recording all the works that were repatriated and documenting the process. The Williamson Gallery received confirmation from the Department of Antiquities that they arrived in Cyprus on December 15th,” Curtis said in a statement to The Scripps Voice.
While RCW staff continue to facilitate repatriation efforts, Halpern emphasized how this issue stems from a much larger problem, which is how Scripps, and universities more generally, function as colonial institutions.
Former Scripps ceramics professor Jasmine Baetz also voiced similar concerns about the origins of collection items.
“Often the places [where these objects are from] have been destabilized by U.S. imperialism,” she said. “So it’s not like something ‘over there.’ We’re very incredibly involved in the conditions that would give way for the excavation and illegal export [of them].”
Halpern concluded by talking about how this story should shift how students view their institutions.
“As students, we have every reason to assume that the administration will tell us what we want to hear, and then go back to upholding U.S. imperialism,” they said. “Without continuous pressure from the community, all momentum will be absorbed into bureaucracy. That’s how this place works.”
Halpern emphasized that the most important steps for the community to take are to hold the College accountable until issues with the collection have been addressed, and encouraged others to sign the petition calling for this change.
