The Denver Artwork Museum says it’s making analysis into artworks related to Emma Bunker a “high precedence” after a Denver Publish investigation detailed how the longtime museum marketing consultant used her scholarship to assist an indicted vendor launder and promote looted relics across the globe.
Museum officers, in a press release posted to the establishment’s web site final week, additionally stated they are going to use cash from an acquisition fund launched after Bunker’s dying final yr to complement ongoing work inspecting the possession historical past of objects within the museum’s Asian artwork assortment.
That fund raised $25,000 from household and buddies and was initially created to assist the museum buy items for its galleries. After publication of The Publish’s sequence, the museum eliminated the fund’s donation web page from its web site.
“The wide-ranging influence of the Bunker household is mirrored of their title being current in some ways in our collections,” Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Artwork Museum, stated within the assertion. “This isn’t a historical past that may or must be simply erased. It must be completely researched and clearly and publicly defined.”
The museum stated it’s “deeply troubled” by paperwork included in The Publish’s tales about Bunker and her work with Douglas Latchford — lots of which had been publicly obtainable. The museum’s board of trustees will now decide the “finest path ahead in coping with the Bunker Gallery in its Asian assortment.”
“Within the a long time because the Latchford/Bunker antiquities arrived on the Denver Artwork Museum, acquisition and mortgage practices throughout the museum discipline, together with these on the DAM, have developed and improved,” museum officers stated of their assertion.
The museum’s first public assertion on the Bunker controversy got here two days after The Publish’s editorial board known as for the establishment’s high brass to deal with the newspaper’s “Looted” sequence and to take away Bunker’s title from museum reveals.
The Publish discovered that Bunker spent years helping Latchford, one of many world’s foremost antiquities collectors and sellers, as he peddled stolen antiquities around the globe. A federal grand jury in 2019 indicted Latchford on a number of fees associated to smuggling stolen artwork into the US. He died in 2020 earlier than he might stand trial.
The scholar, who spent six a long time affiliated with the Denver Artwork Museum, helped Latchford falsify provenance paperwork — or possession historical past — for relics recognized to be pillaged from Cambodia’s historic temples, The Publish discovered.
She’s named or referenced in 5 civil and felony instances associated to illicit antiquities dealings — although she by no means was charged or sued herself.
And it was her connections in Denver that allowed Latchford to make use of the Mile Excessive Metropolis’s esteemed establishment as a manner station for looted items. The Bangkok vendor offered, loaned or gifted greater than a dozen items to the Denver Artwork Museum and used Bunker’s scholarship to market these items in future gross sales.
The museum this yr gave again 4 Cambodian relics related to Latchford and Bunker after federal authorities moved to grab them.
In the meantime, the U.S. Division of Homeland Safety is at present investigating three items from Thailand that stay within the museum’s assortment — together with one which had been donated by Bunker.