The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.
“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning.
That will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space in the storied museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.
“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview.
“But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”
Persons:
Sean Decatur, ” Decatur, ”
Organizations:
American Museum of, Eastern
Locations:
Eastern Woodlands, Manhattan