How is it that some sculptures in museums and private collections around the world are returned to countries of origin and others are not? Sonya Rhie Mace describes her first-hand experiences with three monumental Khmer antiquities that moved between sites and museums in and out of Cambodia. She will show how each object’s unique history, once revealed, leads to clarity of understanding and international cooperation.
Since 2012, Sonya Rhie Mace has been the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Adjunct Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University. Previously, she served as the Curator of Asian Art at the San Diego Museum of Art and taught classes in South Asian and Himalayan art history at UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC San Diego. Her publications include History of Early Stone Sculpture at Mathura, ca. 150 BCE to 100 CE (Brill 2007) and multiple articles and essays on topics in early Indian sculpture, Indian painting, South Asian modernism, and restitution. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including "Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose," which opened at the San Diego Museum of Art and traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi in 2008. More recently, her major exhibitions at Cleveland include "Art and Stories of Mughal India" in 2016 and "Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain" in 2021, an iteration of which was exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.