When thieves stole over 1,000 artifacts from the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), the museum lost not only pieces of art but also cultural history.
The burglary occurred at the museum’s off-site storage facility at approximately 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 15, according to a media release by the city of Oakland. The Oakland Police Department and the FBI Art Crime Team investigated the incident and released security footage related to the case. While the suspects have been described, they have yet to be identified.
“This is a loss not only for OMCA, but for the broader community,” said Lori Fogarty, executive director and CEO of OMCA, according to a statement by the museum. “The museum takes its responsibility to steward California’s history and cultural legacy with the utmost seriousness and remains committed to recovering the stolen items and ensuring their continued care for future generations.”
Emma Keenan-Grice and Joseph Espinosa, both art teachers at Carlmont, visit art museums as much as possible. They are both members of multiple museums in San Francisco.
“It’s important that all of human achievement is available to the public to see, to learn about, to experience. Art is a communication between the artist and the public,” Espinosa said.
The significance behind the stolen artifacts cannot be understated. They included historic memorabilia, pieces by artist Florence Resnikoff, and Native American artifacts such as baskets, jewelry, and scrimshaws. Each stolen piece represented cultural history.
“Museums have historically been a place that celebrated the Western canon, artwork that showed art from the western ideology,” Keenan-Grice said. “As time has gone on, that’s been changing.”
Work by Resnikoff
Resnikoff was an American artist who created contemporary jewelry and sculpture, specializing in soldering and using electrochemical solutions to change metal colors. According to a documentary about her work, “A Life In Art,” Resnikoff took a class in drawing and design at the Art Institute of Chicago and then taught herself about jewelry through books.
“As I went on and worked and took these classes, I became more and more interested in art,” Resnikoff said in the documentary.
Resnikoff’s art has been exhibited in the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Some of her art pieces are featured in the Oakland Museum of Art. They are among the stolen items.
The history of Native American art in museums
OMCA is communicating with the affiliated Indigenous tribe connected to the stolen artifacts, according to their statement, though the tribe has requested to remain anonymous. While this institution has been open to collaboration, many other museums across the country have historically refused such relationships.
Diane Fraher is the co-founder of Amerinda, an organization dedicated to making the indigenous perspective available to a broad audience through the creation of new work in visual, performing, literary, and media arts. She has documented Cherokee heritage and is a member of the Osage Nation, a sovereign Native American nation. Fraher emphasized that she speaks for herself, not on behalf of all Natives.
Historically, some museums have incorporated Native American art and artifacts into their exhibits as part of their claims to the concept of Manifest Destiny, according to Fraher.
“The taking of the Native peoples’ cultural patrimony was handled in the same way that the theft of land and resources was handled. It’s just another resource. It’s something else that was Native that could be taken,” Fraher said.
For a long time, there was no relationship between the Native Americans and the European people who came to North America. Europeans believed that it was their Manifest Destiny to spread out across the world, using the excuse of converting Native people to Christianity, according to Fraher.
“There was no real relationship between one group and another one where they learned or there could be a place of shared knowledge and resources; it was just the results of what one group took from another and then decided what they thought was important about it or not,” Fraher said.
There are ways museums can showcase Native art in collaboration with Native artists and communities. Fraher said that Native people could lend their patrimony to the museum and collaborate to present it in the best way possible.
“In a relationship, it’s like a friendship; it opens up all these other possibilities that weren’t happening before,” Fraher said.
According to the OMCA, the museum has established a Native Advisory Council comprised of compensated Native Californian community leaders who develop temporary exhibitions and programs, advise on the work of the main galleries, and discuss other relevant matters to the Indigenous peoples of California.
“Sadly, we can’t change the past, and we can’t rescue people from the past, but we can figure out how to go forward in a good way from here,” Fraher said.
