Isaiah Acosta

screenprinted t-shirts, ceramic, zine, photographs

 

As talked about in Chad Elias’s, Who’sDigitalHeritage, “in Europe and the United States, museums now operate on the assumption that an important part of their core business is the acquisition and management of rights to their collection in order to maximize return on investment.” A big part of this is the ability to market significant cultural artifacts as merchandise, not because they want to preserve the aura of the object. We see this exemplified in the Neues Museum’s handling of the Nefertiti Bust, where they claimed they wanted to preserve the aura of the stolen artifact, but in actuality wanted to profit off of, “high-quality gypsum replicas that it sold to the public as limited edition pieces. Sold for close to 9,000 euros each...”. Through this project I hoped to question the way Museums often inherit their artifacts from beneficiaries or archivists that have no cultural ties to the belongings, dismembering them from the place and stories that made them so beautiful in the first place.

 

For this project I decided to take t-shirts, a common piece of merchandise, associated with disposability and replicability and transform them into exclusive pieces of art. The Shirts will contain screen prints of stolen ceramic objects made in Mexico, a place where my ancestors engaged in the same practice.

 

The pieces I chose are currently housed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art were donated by Robert W. DeForest and his wife who were presidents of the Mets archive starting in the late 1870’s. While Conducting research on the donated pieces, I found that Emily Johnston, the wife of Robert W. Deforest, would rent a buggy and go around spewing a fabricated story on why she needed or wanted the artifacts at the time; only to house them in the Met archive at the time.

 

By printing these t-shirts I hoped to memorialize these objects while simultaneously breaking them free of the colonialist prison in which they are housed. I displayed these pieces of art on a zine , to give them life and allow for more visibility through distribution.

 

I was inspired by Morehshin Allahyari who in 2015 recreated statues of the King of Hatra, a stolen sculpture, in an effort to undermine proprietary claims that increasingly govern the digital archive associated with 3D printing technology and allow for greater visibility of those cultural objects. I wanted to explore questions such as, who has the right to reconstruct destroyed heritage and how contemporary technologies alter the material weight and symbolic value assigned to artifacts