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2 months ago | 
hyperallergic.com | M. T. Anderson |Erin Thompson
We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, please join us as a member. SIEM REAP, Cambodia — Svay Sareth didn’t remember Cambodia, his own country. Growing up in Site 2, a refugee camp on the border of Thailand, he drew pictures of his homeland based on images he had seen in books.
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2 months ago | 
thenation.com | Erin Thompson
Books & the Arts / January 29, 2025 The Reckless Creation of Whiteness In The Unseen Truth, Sarah Lewis examines how an erroneous 18th-century story about the “Caucasian race” led to a centuries of prejudice and misapprehension. Ad Policy
Mikhail Lermontov’s Memory of Caucasus, 1838.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
hyperallergic.com | Erin Thompson
Editor’s Note: The following story contains mentions of human remains and loss of life. Human life might be fragile, but our bodies are surprisingly durable. Thus, many cultures have preserved and displayed human remains; think of Ancient Egyptian or Andean mummified bodies, Tibetan ritual implements made from skulls or thighbones, and the many bits of Catholic saints enshrined in reliquaries.
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Apr 24, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Erin Thompson
‘Why are you crying, habibi?’ Mansoor Adayfi asked the elephant. He had got into the habit of talking to animals at Guantánamo Bay. Held in solitary confinement for years, he talked to the feral cats who prowled around his cage. ‘I think that’s the glass eye shining,’ I said. We were looking at taxidermy displays in Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa. We had come to Brussels for the opening of an exhibition he’d curated at the European Parliament, of artwork made by Guantánamo detainees.
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Feb 5, 2024 | 
hyperallergic.com | Erin Thompson
I’ve been thinking about absence since last spring, when I visited a patch of churned dirt at Health Sciences Park in Memphis, Tennessee. A monument to the notoriously cruel Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate cavalry commander and first “Grand Wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan, stood there until 2017. The walkways around this now-empty focal point bore fading Black Lives Matter slogans. A tuft of weeds sprouted through the flaking paint of a raised fist. That some dispute had once raged here was clear.
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Oct 15, 2023 | 
hyperallergic.com | Erin Thompson
Felix Kaaya, a member of the Meru people of Tanzania, spent decades searching for his grandfather’s bones. Mangi (“Chief”) Lobulu was among the 19 Indigenous leaders hanged from a single tree on March 2, 1900, during Germany’s brutal suppression of the Meru’s resistance to colonization of East Africa. After that, his body disappeared.
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Sep 20, 2023 | 
hyperallergic.com | Erin Thompson
The Trevi Fountain stinks. I mean this literally. A miasmatic stench hangs over the small piazza around its basin, rising from thethousands of people who crowd into it each day. The smell is more pungent than simple body odor. It is the acrid flop sweat of tourists realizing that everything they’ve dreamed of seeing in Rome in romantic isolation can only be seen standing shoulder to shoulder with all the others who’ve also dreamed of seeing the exact same things.
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Aug 14, 2023 | 
hyperallergic.com | Erin Thompson
I’ve eagerly awaited The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession, Michael Finkel’s book on Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole several billion dollars worth of art from more than 150 museums before he was caught in 2001. I make a brief appearance in the book, since Finkel interviewed me about the psychology of art thieves. I thought I knew the story of how Breitwieser and his girlfriend lived in a bedroom stuffed full of art, upstairs from his (supposedly) oblivious mother.
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Jul 13, 2023 | 
lrb.co.uk | Erin Thompson
Last winter, I visited a stolen goddess at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The label said she was carved in the mid-tenth century in the ‘style of Koh Ker’, an isolated site in northern Cambodia that was briefly the capital of the Khmer Empire. Its distinctive sculptures began to appear on the international art market in the late 1970s, during the Cambodian genocide. A decade ago, Bradley Gordon, a US-born lawyer, set out to learn how the looted sculptures had left the country.
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May 11, 2023 | 
hyperallergic.com | Erin Thompson |M. T. Anderson
SALEM, Mass. — Artist Tsherin Sherpa was eating lunch one day in the cafe at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, taking a break from his demonstration of traditional Tibetan thangka painting, when he noticed that woman was crying while watching him eat his chips and drink his Coke. Sherpa asked her if something was wrong, “and she said, ‘I feel so bad we corrupted you!’” During our recent Zoom interview, Sherpa laughed gently at the memory.
