While Rhonda Reymond has always believed in the value of art and shared that value with students at West Virginia University, she began to truly, keenly feel the loss of art in 2001.
It was in March of that year that the Taliban dynamited and destroyed the magnificent Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.
“It led me to think deeply about why people feel the need to destroy art, and to try and stifle the power of art,” said Reymond, an associate professor of art history in WVU’s College of Creative Arts.
She’s incorporated the topic into her lectures more and more over the last 15 years, “drawing on the very long history of crimes against cultural property that have been employed over thousands of years, across continents, and against many cultural groups.” The history continues to this day, with news outlets covering the destruction of archeological sites at Palmyra in Syria.
Reymond has synthesized her research on the topic into a teaching resource for her fellow art historians. She’s published an extensive lesson plan on Art History Teaching Resources on “Art and Cultural Heritage Looting and Destruction, because art history textbooks do not offer content on the long history of destruction, iconoclasm, looting, restitution, repatriation, and artists’ reconstructions of art and cultural property.”
Her piece resulted from a competitive submission process to the open-source site, which provides on online repository of teaching content.
“It’s a wonderful resource,” Reymond said, noting that it can help educators in art history shore up their knowledge of topics outside their areas of expertise. “The work we do as scholars of the teaching and learning of art history is crucial. As a discipline, we’ve only recently launched a pedagogical journal, so sites like this are very important for teachers of art history.”
In her plan, Reymond covers some of the dramatic recent examples of cultural destruction and some of the reasons given for these acts of violence.
“While iconoclasts have destroyed images due to distrust or fear based around the idea that they are imbued with the power of what they depict, other ideological stances have led people to take objects of material culture by force, stealth, or through suspect legal machinations,” Reymond said, outlining the scope of the problem and the range of motivations that have been expressed through the centuries.
“The Romans looted many sculptural works from Greece, in part to signify their military victories, but also to signal the privileged status and pleasure of owning such aesthetically appealing objects,” Reymond said. “In his Italian campaign, Napoleon determined to ‘have everything that is beautiful in Italy.’”
She then goes on to explore some uplifting examples of restoration and cultural reconciliation, including modern efforts to digitally preserve cultural heritage sites before any more destruction can befall them.
“CyArk provides one example; it’s a non-profit organization that creates 3D digital records with the goal of saving five hundred sites in the next five years,” Reymond explained. WVU is one of seven CyArk Technology Center Partners worldwide.
Her hope is that increased classroom engagement of these issues will lead to greater awareness and advocacy of cultural resources among future generations.
“Art and objects of cultural heritage provide ways of connecting with cultures of the past and contemporary cultures globally,” Reymond said.
Her lesson plan and many others are available on arthistoryteachingresources.org.
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dw/12/9/15
CONTACT: David Welsh, WVU College of Creative Arts
304.293.3397; David.Welsh@mail.wvu.edu
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