The Looting of Cambodia, Part 2

 

[This is the second part of the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun on 28 June 2026.  As readers of Rick On Theater know, I have a strong interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular.

[Other ROT posts on that subject include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); ”Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).] 

“HOW CAMBODIAN ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
ENDED UP IN AMERICAN MUSEUMS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS”
(continued)
by Anderson Cooper

[Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS News website.  I have split it into two parts for republication on ROT, with Part 1 posted on Wednesday. 8 July.  As always, I recommend that ROTters go back and read the beginning of the transcript before turning to Part 2, below.  (There’s a brief précis of Cambodian history in the afterword to Part 1.)]

Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities

It’s taken a team of Cambodian investigators led by Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, more than 10 years to document the theft of thousands of ancient statues and relics by a British collector named Douglas Latchford. As we reported in 2023, they’ve managed to get some of what he stole back, but many of Cambodia’s greatest treasures are still out there, hidden away in the mansions of millionaires and billionaires, and hiding in plain sight, on display in some of the most prestigious museums around the world.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one of the most important collections of Cambodian antiquities in the world. But many of the finest pieces on display here in the Southeast Asian art wing [the South and Southeast Asian Art collection, housed in the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing] . . . are stolen. Like this one. And this one . . . This as well – all passed through the hands of Douglas Latchford. 

Latchford sold this one to the Met in the early 1990s . . . This one he donated. 

Anderson Cooper: Do you think people visiting the Met, know that these were looted? 

Brad Gordon: I think most people walk through the Met, they have no idea those are blood antiquities. They have no idea what– what the history is behind those pieces. They don’t know– the temples they came from. They don’t know the people who were killed to get them here.

Anderson Cooper: The dirt has been brushed off. There’s a little note that says where it came from. Should people believe what’s on that little note?

Brad Gordon: No. Absolutely not.

In 2023, we went with Brad Gordon to see where in Cambodia the Met and other museums’ collections really did come from. 

Anderson Cooper: This is incredible.

This seven-story pyramid is more than 1,000 years old . . . and rises out of the jungle in Koh Ker in northeast Cambodia . . . It’s one of dozens of temples in what was once the capital [928-944 CE] of an ancient Khmer empire.

Anderson Cooper: –looters have been all over this site for– for decades.

Brad Gordon: Correct. 

Anderson Cooper: Douglas Latchford loved the statuary . . .

Brad Gordon: In love with the beauty, in love with the artistic–

Anderson Cooper: The statues from here are–

Anderson Cooper: –have a distinctive style that he particularly loved?

Brad Gordon: Correct. 

And perhaps the most famous statues in that distinctive style that Latchford stole from Koh Ker were nine stone warriors once arranged together in a battle scene [10th century; stolen from the Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker]. When we were there, seven had been returned to the National Museum in Phnom Penh, including this 500-pound sandstone sculpture — it’s the one Sotheby’s tried to sell in 2011. They’re back on their original pedestals, their ankles reunited with their feet, hacked off by looters.

Anderson Cooper: This was at Sotheby’s. This is at Christie’s.

Hab Touch: Norton Simon’s.

Anderson Cooper: Norton Simon Museum [Pasadena, California]–

Hab Touch [b. 1965] is the secretary of state in Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture [2019-present]. He is working with Brad Gordon to bring back the two Koh Ker statues who’s empty pedestals sit in the museum.

Anderson Cooper: So do you know what are supposed to be on–

Anderson Cooper: You know what are supposed to be here, and you know what’s–

Hab Touch: We know–

Anderson Cooper: –supposed to be here?

Hab Touch: Among nine sculpture, we have seven already. Only two missing.

One of those missing sculptures was discovered in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest in 2008 . . . this mythical army commander and a stunning number of other stolen works . . . were all together in the Palm Beach mansion of the late billionaire George Lindemann [1936-2018; businessman; CEO of a fossil fuel infrastructure and pipeline company] and his wife Frayda [b. 1939]. 

[The referenced article and photo spread was “Striking a New Note in Palm Beach” by Judith Thurman in the January 2008 issue of AD. (nb: The link to the slide show that includes the Cambodian statues seems to be broken. Some views are shown on the 60 Minutes video. If a reader is a subscriber to AD, or wishes to become one, back articles are available on the magazine’s website.) There are two later articles that comment/report on this one: Spencer Woodman, Malia Politzer, Peter Whoriskey and Nicole Sadek, “Hidden Treasures: Magazine spread of ‘most beautiful house in America’ conceals allegedly stolen Cambodian relics,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (website) 15 Aug. 2022,  <https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/lindemann-cambodia-relics-altered-photo-magazine/>, 12 July 2026, and Sarah Cascone, “An ‘Architectural Digest’ Spread About Two Art Collectors Was Photoshopped to Obscure Potentially Looted Cambodian Statues in Their Home,” artnet 16 Aug. 2022, <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/looted-cambodian-art-architectural-digest-2160490>, 12 July 2026.]

Anderson Cooper: The ancient treasures of Cambodia were sitting in the living room of an incredibly wealthy family in America, in Florida, on display, while people were having cocktails and–

Brad Gordon: The one thing that I’m always struck by is how many people witnessed it and have been silent and continue to be silent today.

The Lindemann’s spent an estimated $20 million building the collection with the help of Douglas Latchford . . . Frayda Lindemann didn’t respond to our request for an interview.

But in Koh Ker . . . we showed her home to two former looters.

Anderson Cooper: What do you think of this house?

It’s a beautiful house, he said, it looks like it belongs to a king.

The former looters pointed out another statue in the Lindemann’s living room they said they helped steal . . . this reclining figure of the Hindu God Vishnu. They said it was dug out of the ground from this exact spot in late 1995.

Anderson Cooper: You’re 100% sure this was taken from here by you and others in 1995?

Lida (translated): Yeah, I’m sure. 

They also identified a number of other statues they say they stole that appear in books published by Douglas Latchford. They say they found this copper statue using a metal detector.

Anderson Cooper: This is Bodhisattva at Ease [late 10th century to the early 11th century; looted from the Koh Ker temple complex]? 

[In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person who has attained, or is striving towards, bodhi (meaning ‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’) or Buddhahood. In this sculpture, the word refers to a class of powerful, semi-divine savior deities (here, specifically, Avalokiteshvara, a celestial being of infinite compassion and mercy) who forgo or delay personal liberation (nirvana) or bodhi in order to help other individuals reach Buddhahood.]

Brad Gordon: Yeah. 

They dug it out of the ground here in 1990. J.P. Labbat, former special agent with Homeland Security, found photos of the statue covered in dirt on Douglas Latchford’s computer. Latchford sold it to the Met in 1992. When we visited, it was still on display.

Anderson Cooper: You were able to get access to some of Latchford’s– emails?

J.P. Labatt: Yes. And in there– there are d– detailed– stories about the manner in which he obtained pieces, the fact that he was having them reassembled– and repaired, that dirt and– and crustaceans were being– cleaned off of them.

Anderson Cooper: They were freshly dug out of the ground?

J.P. Labatt: Fresh. The– these were fresh pieces that he would describe in his emails that needed a level of restoration before he could even attempt to sell them. 

Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019 but died [of complications of Parkinson’s disease in Bangkok at 89] before he could be put on trial. Federal prosecutors in New York however continued tracing his looted artifacts . . . they believe at least 18 of them have landed up at the Met.

Andrea Bayer: I am very involved in our work on provenance.

Andrea Bayer [b. 1957] is deputy director for Collections and Administration at The Met.

Anderson Cooper: The Met has said that they will return objects based upon rigorous evidentiary review. What rigorous evidentiary review was done before acquiring these pieces?

Andrea Bayer: Not enough.

Anderson Cooper: It seems like the Met had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. They wanted to build up their collection. And nobody was really asking questions where it came from.

Andrea Bayer: For people, many people in the art world, there was a sense of protecting great objects that stood a chance of being destroyed. We no longer feel about it that way.

Under pressure 13 years ago, the Met did return two statues called Kneeling Attendants [10th century; stolen from Koh Ker during the civil war of the 1970s], which had been donated to them by Douglas Latchford. 

Anderson Cooper: In 2013, when you returned the kneeling attendants, did you investigate the other items that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I don’t know the answer to that question. I can only pick up the story several years later, when Doug– Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019, when we immediately and proactively went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and offered our full cooperation.

Anderson Cooper: Well, I can pick up the story actually in 2013, because a spokesman for the Met, said that “No special effort was gonna be made to check the provenances of any other Douglas Latchford donated work.” Why wouldn’t the Met want to look into everything else that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I can’t speculate about why that didn’t happen.

Anderson Cooper: But no one investigated all the other items that Douglas Latchford gave?

Andrea Bayer: Not to my knowledge.

The Met is not the only major museum with looted Cambodian artifacts, but its collection is one of the largest in the world. In 2023, the museum announced it would create a research team to examine the provenance or acquisition history of all its collections. 

Anderson Cooper: It’s taken 10 years since Douglas Latchford was shown to have given stolen property to the Met, for the Met to set up this provenance team. Why has it taken 10 years?

Andrea Bayer: It was a slow process, I’ll grant you that. It was a slow process, but– I think that the fact that we are– fully engaged now, fully cooperative now is– is our only answer to this really. it’s a moment of reckoning, and we’re ready to do what it takes now– to right whatever the wrong is. 

Anderson Cooper: Four years ago, when Douglas Latchford was indicted by prosecutors, did you set up a team to check the provenance of every Latchford work–

Andrea Bayer: Yes. We started, absolutely we started to dig in right then and there. It’s not easy. I mean the fact that we don’t have much information has to do with the fact that it’s very hard to find the information–

Anderson Cooper: But there’s enough information for federal prosecutors- to charge Douglas Latchford with stealing and looting and trafficking in smuggled items. How much more evidence do you need? You haven’t–

Andrea Bayer: We need–

Anderson Cooper: –returned any of the– any Douglas Latchford-related items since he’s been indicted, and that was four years ago.

Andrea Bayer: But we are on the verge of– of– of returning a number of them.

Anderson Cooper: All of them?

Andrea Bayer: That I can’t say.

Four months after that interview, just two days before we went to air in 2023, prosecutors announced the Met would return 13 antiquities that came through Douglas Latchford.

But the Met has not returned this statue, which was specifically cited in the indictment of Latchford, or this one, which Latchford sold to the Met in 1992.

Cambodia’s Culture Minister called the Met’s announcement a “first step” and says she looks “forward to the return of many more of our treasures.”

Anderson Cooper: Shouldn’t museums have thought twice about buying things that were coming out of Cambodia in– during the genocide and civil war and decades of strife?

J.P. Labatt: And this question that you raise is really– the– the crux of– of what we’re wrestling with. 

J.P. Labatt: You– acquired pieces from a known smuggler who– used a team of looters that the government has interviewed and taken statements from. They have emails which refute the information in your own provenance at the museum. You have items in the museum which were named in the indictment of Latchford that are still there. And so these pieces should go back.

Anderson Cooper: There’s no question.

J.P. Labatt: It’s the right thing to do.

In 2023, the Lindemann family, whose collection was showcased in Architectural Digest, struck a deal with federal authorities . . . voluntarily agreeing to return 33 stolen treasures. In a statement to the New York Times [Tom Mashberg, “Lindemann Family Returns 33 Looted Artifacts to Cambodia,” 12 Sept. 2023 (online only)], the Lindemann’s said: “Having purchased these items from dealers that we assumed were reputable, we were saddened to learn how they made their way to the market in the United States.”

Anderson Cooper: Why did the Lindemanns agree to return their collection to Cambodia?

J.P. Labatt: The pieces were dirty. I– I think they finally came around to the– the fact that– Latchford was dirty, their collection was– was all looted pieces. It was obvious. And– and so they– they– decided to surrender them.

We got a peek at what was the Lindemann collection shortly after the deal was done. It was sitting in a warehouse in upstate New York. A nation’s living gods and ancestors waiting for a ride home.

Brad Gordon: This is like a whole wing of a museum.

A wing of a museum that only the Lindemann’s and their friends had access to. 

Anderson Cooper: If the Lindemann’s hadn’t published these in Architectural Digest back in 2008?

Brad Gordon: I think there’s a good chance we maybe never would have found it. 

Brad Gordon: We always say, the gods want to come home. We feel like the gods have spoken today. They want to come home.

As one of the biggest crates was being opened . . . waiting eagerly was Muikong Taing and Thyda Long . . . two members of Brad Gordon’s investigative team. This would be their first look at the mythical army commander taken from Koh Ker . . . they were likely the first Cambodians to set eyes on it since Douglas Latchford stole it more than 50 years ago.

Thyda Long: He’s here.

Anderson Cooper: There’s a look in his eyes and on his face.

Thyda Long: It’s much bigger than I expected it to be.

Anderson Cooper: His presence is extraordinary.

Thyda Long: I did not expect to feel this way. 

Even the commander seemed to be smiling. 

Then it was time to see the rarest piece in the Lindemann’s collection. The Cambodian team knelt in reverence as the Hindu god Vishnu [10th century; looted from the Prasat Krachap temple in Koh Ker] was uncrated. Despite all the fuss, he appeared unperturbed . . . reclining in a cosmic slumber. When this statue arrived in Cambodia, it was welcomed as one of the most important ever returned.

Earlier this month, the Met returned two more artifacts to Cambodia following a seizure by the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The Cambodian government is still demanding the repatriation of 30 others in the Met’s possession.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee. 

[With respect to restoration of the ancient artifacts in the Cambodian temples about which Anderson Cooper reports above, looting, aside from its desecration, is an act of vandalism—the willful and malicious damaging of the sculptures. 

[In my coverage of art conservation and preservation on ROT, there are other forms of damage and potential damage against which art conservators and restorers must struggle.  I want to offer a look at another kind of conservation and restoration with which I had personal experience.

[Back in 2007, there was an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., on the conservation and preservation of experimental and innovative art that doesn’t age well or lend itself easily to cleaning.  

[As artists were experimenting with new media and techniques, they never considered how those elements would change over time.  This created sometimes immense challenges for museums and conservators, as well as private owners with fewer resources, long after the artists had probably died. 

[Some years earlier, in 1985, the Hirshhorn had mounted another exhibit in which works modern artists from the museum’s own collection that had undergone conservation treatment were shown.  The conserved pieces were accompanied by photographs depicting what they’d looked like before the treatment.  

[A later Hirshhorn display, in 2003-2004, was “intended to address the interaction of principle, practice, materials, techniques and ideas, which characterizes the preservation and care of contemporary and modern art.”

[I had a serious problem of this nature with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.  The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist painting, Intermezzo by Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of this issue.  

[The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, a 14th-birthday gift for me from my parents, is one of the most cherished pieces I have and, except when I went to college and the army, I took it with me every time I moved. 

[In the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.  The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.  Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large clumps?  

[As the paint dried, the globs shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or “scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the canvas.  I knew that if I didn’t do something, I’d lose the painting.  

[I was frantic.  I even went so far as to write to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now just The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on the third floor of the old main building, the school displayed a larger Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.  I asked if they had encountered the same problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.

[At the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, so I asked him to use his contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save Intermezzo and he did.  In 1987, I ended up paying five times the painting’s 1960 purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it to prevent further deterioration.  To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure for a New York second.]

The Looting of Cambodia, Part 1

[This post is the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun 28 June 2026.  Apparently, I didn’t deem Anderson Cooper’s report worth republishing on Rick On Theater two-and-a-half years ago, but on watching it again last week, I decided it is.  Given my interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular, I can’t explain my first decision.]

“HOW CAMBODIAN ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
ENDED UP IN AMERICAN MUSEUMS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS”
by Anderson Cooper

[Anderson Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS News website.  I have split it into two parts for republication on ROT.  The second installment will be posted on Saturday, 11 July. 

[Other posts on ROT that deal with the conservation or preservation of art and antiquities include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); “Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).]

Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities

The theft of Cambodia’s cultural treasures . . . thousands of sacred stone, bronze and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country . . . might just be the greatest art heist in history. It began nearly a century ago when Cambodia was colonized by France [the French protectorate lasted from 1863 until 1953, interrupted from 1941 to 1945 during the World War II occupation by Japan] . . . but in the 1970s, 80s and 90s amidst genocide, civil war, and political turmoil – the looting became a global business, much of it run by a British man named Douglas Latchford [1931-2020]. He kept some of it for himself, but much of what his gang of thieves stole, Latchford then sold to wealthy private collectors and some of the most important museums around the world. As we first reported in 2023, Cambodia’s government has spent the last 14 years trying to track it all down . . . and bring their history and heritage home.

Angkor Wat [Khmer for ‘City (or ‘Capital’) of Temples’], with its towering spires, is the glory of Cambodia. Nearly a thousand years old, it’s one of the biggest and most extraordinary religious temples in the world — sprawling across 400 acres. Originally built [1122-1150 CE] to honor the Hindu god Vishnu, it then became a Buddhist temple [ca. 1181 CE], and remains a place of worship today. You can wander here for weeks, lost in a labyrinth of ancient stone corridors and sacred chambers. But the scars of plunder run deep: looters have hacked off the heads of many statues . . . they’ve stolen bodies as well . . . empty pedestals mark where gods and deities once stood . . . on some, only the feet remain.

It’s worse in the rest of Cambodia’s 4,000 temples. Nearly all have been looted. This one is a hundred miles northeast of Angkor Wat . . . on a remote mountain . . . called Sandak [established late 9th century CE].

Brad Gordon: This was hit very heavily by the looting gangs.

Brad Gordon: They found gold, they found statues, they found many, many things.

That’s Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, who’s been working for the Cambodian government for 14 years, tracking down its stolen treasures . . . he brought us to Sandak with his team of investigators, archeologists and art scholars.

Anderson Cooper: This is so cool.

In the temple’s crumbling courtyard, little remains . . . mostly empty pedestals scattered among the Sralao trees.

Anderson Cooper: It’s remarkable to me just how much stuff is just scattered on the ground. 

Brad Gordon: Yes.

Brad Gordon: It’s like a pedestal graveyard.

Anderson Cooper: We’ve all seen in museums these statues with no feet on them, and I don’t think people realize the feet were hacked off. Because in order to steal them, that’s the easiest way to– to get them off the pedestal.

Brad Gordon: And we know when the looters came to sites like this, the first thing they took was the heads. That was the easiest to grab. And then later on maybe they come back and get the torso. But they were not very careful, so they left behind pieces.

For Cambodians, these statues are not just works of art . . . they are sacred deities that hold the souls of their ancestors to whom they ask for guidance and pray . . .

Anderson Cooper: This is incredible. Th– these were all looted.

Phoeurng Sackona: Yes, all looted.

Anderson Cooper: All of these heads, like, cut off–

Phoeurng Sackona: And the head was cut off, yes.

Phoeurng Sackona [b. 1959], Cambodia’s minister of culture [2013-present], is in charge of the government’s efforts to track down their stolen gods. We met her in a closely guarded warehouse not far from Angkor Wat . . . ––where more than 6,000 pieces from temples across the country are stored for safekeeping . . . each one sculpted by an artisan from an ancient Khmer Empire . . . that lasted for more than five centuries [802-1431 CE] and spanned Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. 

Anderson Cooper: So the statues have a soul? The statues are– are they living?

Phoeurng Sackona: For us, yes.

Phoeurng Sackona: And we believe that we can talk with them. They will hear. They will see. What do you want? What do you see? What do you do in your life, in your house, outside in the society, also? So that–

Anderson Cooper: They’re watching.

Phoeurng Sackona: They’re watching, everywhere . . .

Phoeurng Sackona’s entire family was killed in the genocide that began in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist group took over, forcing millions of Cambodians into labor camps. Some 2 million people, nearly a quarter of the population, were slaughtered or starved to death. The Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979 [to the invading army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam], but fighting and instability continued for decades, leaving Cambodia’s temples unprotected and vulnerable . . . easy targets for unscrupulous antiquities dealers like Douglas Latchford.

Anderson Cooper: Who was Douglas Latchford?

Brad Gordon: I would say that he was, in many ways, the mastermind behind the greatest art heist in history.

Anderson Cooper: The greatest art heist in history?

Brad Gordon: Yes, in terms of scope and multitude of crime sites and the enormous amount of statues that were taken out.

Latchford lived in Thailand . . . an enigmatic British businessman . . . he began collecting in the 1960s. He had, it seems, two great loves: Cambodian antiquities and . . . Thai bodybuilders . . . He sponsored Bangkok’s biggest bodybuilding competition, the Latchford Classic [from ca. 2004].

Anderson Cooper: How would you describe him?

Brad Gordon: He was extremely deceptive, I think in many ways, was ruthless. But he hid that behind this incredible façade of charm.

Latchford portrayed himself as a scholar and protector of Cambodia’s culture, a reputation he burnished by donating sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other prestigious institutions. He also published three books filled with the finest examples of Cambodian antiquities [Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art (Art Media Resources, 2004); Khmer Gold Gifts for the Gods (Art Media Resources, 2008); Khmer Bronzes: New Interpretations of the Past (Art Media Resources, 2011)] . . . many of them, it turns out, Latchford had stolen.

Brad Gordon: He was using the books as sales catalogs. You know, he was handing them out. He was using them to sell pieces. And– and he understood a certain psychology of collectors out there that if they see something in a beautiful book, they think it’s legitimate.

Those books have been an invaluable guide for Brad Gordon and his team, helping them compile a database of thousands of missing artifacts. Many of which they didn’t know existed until Latchford published photos of them. 

Gordon’s team got their big break when they met this man in 2012. He was a former Khmer Rouge child soldier and leader of a gang of looters. His name was Toek Tik [ca. 1959-2021; pronounced day duck].

Brad Gordon: That first meeting, I– I didn’t really know who we had met. You know, I knew– I knew that he was important. I knew that many people were telling me he was the best. And I knew that he was feared. 

Anderson Cooper: Why were people afraid of him?

Brad Gordon: You know, over the years, he had killed many people. 

It turned out Toek Tik had worked for decades supplying Douglas Latchford with thousands of treasures . . . and he was amazed to see them again in Latchford’s books.

Brad Gordon: He kept opening the book and going back to the front cover and– and going through and tapping and saying, “I know this one. I know this one. I know this one.” 

Anderson Cooper: And when he says he knew this one, means he– he helped loot the– those ones.

Brad Gordon: That’s what we learned later, yeah.

Toek Tik became a key confidential source for Gordon’s team. They gave him a code name, Lion, to protect his identity. And followed him to dozens of temples where he confessed what he’d found, and how he’d stolen it.

Brad Gordon: He would say to us, “I’m gonna transfer everything in my head to you. I’m gonna tell you everything. Every secret.”

Anderson Cooper: You felt like his memory was very good. It was accurate.

Brad Gordon: Oh it was unbelievable. He remembered the size of everything. Measured against his body. He would use his arm to show us how long a statue was.

Anderson Cooper: Why do you think he wanted to cooperate?

Brad Gordon: You know, he felt tremendously guilty about many things he had done in his life, about the killing, about the looting. And we offered him a road of redemption– a way to do something really good at the end of his life.

They recorded hundreds of hours of Lion’s testimony . . . he explained how gangs of looters would spend weeks at remote temples . . . using shovels, chisels, metal detectors . . . even dynamite . . . to find and dig out treasures. Dozens of men would hoist heavy stone statues onto oxcarts before transporting them across the border . . . into Thailand . . . and into the hands of Douglas Latchford. Lion never met Latchford, but he’d send him photographs of artifacts he could choose from.

Brad Gordon: We hear about them saying, “Oh we had to go to this temple and take a photo. And then sending it back.” You know, my sense is he was shopping. He had a list. The looters knew his priorities.

Like these . . . which came from a temple complex called Koh Ker [koh kay]. The statues from there had a distinctive style that Latchford loved.

It was, however, a dangerous business. Most looters only made enough to buy food for their families. And fighting between rival gangs was common. 

Anderson Cooper: People were killed over these– these antiquities. Do you look at these as blood statues?

Brad Gordon: For sure. They’re blood antiquities. Whenever I see a statue I think about, you know, who died to– to get this out of the ground or get it out of a temple and to– to move it here? So, so much of this looting was done in the shadow of the war, shadow of the genocide. 

It was this 500-pound sandstone warrior from Koh Ker that appeared in a Sotheby’s auction catalog in 2011 that put Douglas Latchford on the radar of U.S. law enforcement. Its feet were missing. And the price tag? An estimated $2-3 million.

J.P. Labbat: When it appeared in the market– there were a number of archaeologists, a number of people who immediately recognized the– the source of the statue as being a specific temple in Cambodia.

Anderson Cooper: It c– came from Koh Ker?

J.P. Labbat: That’s right.

Until he retired in 2023, J.P. Labbat was a special agent on the cultural property, art and antiquities unit with Homeland Security. 

J.P. Labbat: A team from the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Southern District of New York traveled to Cambodia– to inspect the site where the statue had been removed.

J.P. Labbat: And so the base– was still there with it with the feet still in the ground. And so– they were able to match that base and feet to the statue.

Anderson Cooper: And that was enough evidence to get the statue pulled off the market?

J.P. Labbat: That’s right. 

After years of legal wrangling, Sotheby’s finally agreed to send this stolen warrior back to Cambodia . . .

A ceremony was held welcoming it home . . . and investigators were able to trace its original sale back to Douglas Latchford . . . who was asked about its repatriation in a German documentary in 2014 [Die Spur der Tempelräuber (‘The trail of the temple robbers’; known in English as The Stolen Warriors; nb: film databases like IMDb list the release date as 2015)].

Wolfgang Luck: Is it a good day for Cambodia, or is it a bad day for the art market if these things are coming back? 

Douglas Latchford: It’s a good day for Cambodia, it’s a bad day for the art market.

Law enforcement in New York was closing in on Latchford, but he claimed prosecutors had him all wrong. 

Douglas Latchford: Their imagination has gone wild. They’ve seen too many Indiana Jones films. As far as I know there is no such thing as a smuggling network and I certainly don’t belong to any smuggling network.

Anderson Cooper: The attempted sale of this statue in 2011, was that a turning point in the unraveling of Douglas Latchford?

J.P. Labbat: I would say yes. That case put more of a– focus and a spotlight on him. And then efforts were– were then doubled to, like, really peel back the onion and look into Latchford’s activities.

The testimony of former looters found by Brad Gordon and his team was critical for the U.S. attorney’s case against Latchford. 

Anderson Cooper: How rare is it to actually have access to the looters? To people who actually stole these things 10, 20, 30 years ago.

J.P. Labbat: I know of no other case where– where that’s happened. And– it– it’s quite remarkable to have looters actively assisting a team of investigators to recover artifacts that they had a firsthand in helping remove from the country.

Douglas Latchford was finally indicted by U.S. authorities in 2019 for smuggling, conspiracy, wire fraud and other charges, but he died before he could be put on trial. Brad Gordon eventually convinced Latchford’s family to return his personal collection of stolen treasures . . . Among the first pieces to come home in 2021 was this statue from Koh Ker. Lion, weakened by cancer, came to inspect it in Cambodia’s National Museum to verify it was the same one he’d dug out of the ground.

Brad Gordon: And then he turned to me and he said, “It’s the real statue.” You know, it was a remarkable thing to watch. And just his– his relationship, it– it was living to him.

Anderson Cooper: Do you think he was happy it was back? 

Brad Gordon: Thrilled. So happy, he knew that he had done something good. 

Lion died a few months later . . . but the secrets he revealed continue to bring statues back to Cambodia’s National Museum . . . masterpieces that left the country long before these school children were born.

Anderson Cooper: Does the return of these statues, of these Gods, help some to heal.

Phoeurng Sackona: Yes. To get back the soul of the nation.

Anderson Cooper: The soul of the nation.

Phoeurng Sackona: It’s not only for me– but all of my family who was died [sic] during the war, and for– for all Cambodian people.

There are still many more stolen Cambodian statues and artifacts in museums and private collections around the world. 

When we return, Cambodia’s fight to get those looted relics back.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee. 

[I don’t want to do a history lesson here, but I think a little background and some identifications are useful.  The Khmer Empire was established in 802 CE and by the 12th century, when most of the temples in the 60 Minutes report were built, was the largest empire in Southeast Asia.  The empire prospered and grew until 1431, when wars with neighboring kingdoms led to the sack of Angkor, the imperial capital. The empire went into decline and existed under the influence of Siam and Annam (now known as Thailand and Vietnam), reduced to little more than a vassal state.

[King Norodom (1834-1904) signed a treaty of protection with France, making the Kingdom of Cambodia a French protectorate—read “colony”—from 1863 until it gained independence in 1953 under King Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012).  In 1970, Sihanouk was ousted in a military coup by Lon Nol (1913-85), a Cambodian politician and general who proclaimed the Khmer Republic. 

[Khmer means ‘Cambodian’ in the native language, which is also called Khmer.  Khmer Rouge, French for ‘Red Cambodian,’ is the name Sihanouk gave to the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot (1925-98); it became the term everyone, both inside the country and abroad, used for the CPK.  Kampuchea is the anglicization of the indigenous Khmer name for Cambodia.

[On 17 April 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces took Phnom Penh, the capital of the country, and the next year established the radical Marxist-Leninist state of Democratic Kampuchea.  Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge set about removing from Kampuchea all foreign and bourgeois influences by rounding up all intellectuals, professionals, capitalists, and artists and sending them to camps in the countryside; Phnom Penh, a city of 370,000 inhabitants in 1975, was almost emptied of people. 

[By 1978, only 32,000 people lived in the city; many of the Cambodians the Khmer Rouge transported died either from execution, harsh conditions and treatment, or disease.  Between 21 and 24 percent of Cambodia’s population was lost, from 1.7 to 1.9 million people. 

[After years of hostility between the two communist countries, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—the now-united North and South Vietnam—invaded Kampuchea in 1979 in response to border raids by the Khmer Rouge.  The Vietnamese forces defeated the Khmer Rouge and established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea; Pol Pot fled and was eventually arrested by his own Khmer Rouge in 1997 and tried in Phnom Penh.  He received a life sentence to be served under house arrest, but died, likely by suicide, in 1998.

[In 1993, the monarchy was restored and the country again became the Kingdom of Cambodia.  King Sihanouk retook the throne until his abdication in 2004; his successor is his son, Norodom Sihamoni (b. 1953).  The head of government in Cambodia is Prime Minister Hun Manet (b, 1977), in office since 2023.  

[Anderson Cooper left 60 Minutes in May 2026, announcing his departure in People magazine in February 2026.  He explained, “I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they still want to spend time with me."  He remains anchor of the CNN broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360.°]

Replicating Classic Art Works

 

[Art and technology have been colliding for some time.  Earlier instances of this conjunction seem primitive today, the distance between Frankenstein’s monster and a clone.  But that hasn’t stopped either side of the connection from forging ahead, for good or ill.

[Here’s a report on a pairing of computer technology and painting to examine and analyze works of art, identify deterioration from aging and mishandling, determine authenticity, and—and this is the truly controversial application—duplicate the work. 

[Yes, someone’s developed a computer that can scan and then copy a painting so precisely that the replicant can hardly be distinguished from the original.  The company at the center of this story is cloning paintings. 

[It sounds like a horror story in the world of art.  What could go wrong?] 

“3D TECH PRESERVES AND REPRODUCES MASTERPIECES,
RAISING ETHICAL QUESTIONS”
by Paul Solman and Diane Lincoln Estes

[This is a transcript of a PBS News Hour segment that aired on 15 January 2026; the online version (with video) is posted at 3D tech preserves and reproduces masterpieces, raising ethical questions | PBS News.]

3D scanning technology is being used to examine and replicate classic works of art. It’s raising some ethical questions about what it means to preserve authenticity and democratize access in an age when the line between originals and copies grows ever thinner. Paul Solman reports for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Amna Nawaz [Co-Anchor of PBS News Hour]: The art of 3-D scanning.

Paul Solman looks at how technology is being used to examine and replicate classic works of art and some ethical questions about what it means to preserve authenticity and democratize access in an age when the line between originals and copies grows ever thinner.

It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Paul Solman: [In close-up, a hand reaches out to rub across The Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75)] Ever want to do this to a beloved painting before a museum guard said, don’t touch? [Solman is shown about to rub his hand across Burial at Sea (1842) by British artist J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851; English Romantic painter, printmaker, and watercolorist)]. Well, I did from the time I was a kid. And now I actually can feel the paint.

This is an art tech story prompted by entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan.

Jerry Kaplan, Stanford University: [Walking across a plaza with Solman and a small, wheeled, sort of R2D2 robot in a tie and hat.] It’s like a jackrabbit, but it’s a robot.

[Jerry Kaplan (b. 1952) is an American computer scientist, author, and entrepreneur who currently serves as a Lecturer and Research Affiliate at Stanford University. He is a prominent figure in the field of Artificial Intelligence and has been a significant contributor to the Silicon Valley ecosystem for over three decades.

[Kaplan holds multiple academic and research positions across various departments at Stanford. He is a Lecturer and Research Affiliate who teaches courses on the social and economic impact of Artificial Intelligence; a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX) within the Stanford Law School; a visiting lecturer in the Computer Science department, focusing on the philosophy and ethics of AI; and a strategic director associated with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

[Kaplan is a recognized entrepreneur and author who co-founded four Silicon Valley startups, including GO Corporation (pioneering tablet computing) and Onsale.com. He is known for his work on tablet computers, natural language systems, and AI, publishing books like Startup, Humans Need Not Apply, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative Artificial Intelligence.]

Paul Solman: Kaplan has gurued me and you through the emerging high-tech world for a decade.

Jerry Kaplan: Mary, what do you feel about your own death?

Mary, A.I.: I guess, technically, I cannot die since I am a digital being.

Paul Solman: But what’s the art angle?

Jerry Kaplan: My mother died last year at the ripe old age of 99. And one of her most prized possessions was a painting of me and my little sister from what was an unknown artist at the time by the name of Wayne Thiebaud. And the picture was titled Children of the ’60s [1967].

[Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) was an American painter known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects, such as pies, cakes, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs, as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. Thiebaud is regarded as one of the United States’ most beloved and recognizable artists.

[He is associated with the Pop Art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, though he slightly predated the classic pop artists, producing his early works of this style in the fifties and sixties. Thiebaud created his precursor works to Pop Art in the mid-to-late 1950s; the classic American Pop Art movement exploded in the early 1960s.]

Paul Solman: But now it’s worth millions [between $1 million and $1.5 million].

Jerry Kaplan: Well, what do we do with it? There are two of us, me and my sister. And while we would both like to have a copy, the truth is that it’s just too valuable.

Paul Solman: So, unlike King Solomon’s split the baby in two, he came up with a high-tech solution.

Jerry Kaplan: This is an exact, precise reproduction at a micro level.

[It turns out that the Kaplans didn’t keep the portrait. The painting was sold at Christie’s New York during their Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 15 May 2024 for $1,071,000.]

Paul Solman: Of the Kaplans’ Thiebaud and of this lady a half-a-millennium young [view of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (aka: La Gioconda, ca. 1503-06)]. The technology was first used to analyze her condition.

Patrick Robinson, Arius Technology: Nobody expected these paintings to last for 500 years. Particularly with the Mona Lisa, there are stress factors and twisting of wood and things that are certainly occurring over time.

[I have a post, “Conserving Modern Art” (11 December 2018), that discusses the effects of time on works of art. The topic is modern art and the experimental media used to create it, but the general coverage applies to classic works and traditional materials as well.]

Paul Solman: The surface, for example, has been cracking for centuries. And eventually, says Patrick Robinson of Arius Technology [b. 1959 or 1960; Canadian; finance and investment manager], to preserve it will mean to store it safely away. Same for other time-honored paintings and frescoes, van Goghs [Vincent van Gogh (1853-90); Dutch Post-Impressionist painter], Monets [Claude Monet (1840-1926); French painter; founder of Impressionism], and other works of the faraway past.

Patrick Robinson: You can imagine cities that are affected by water levels and things like that and destruction. We intend to be at the center point of those restorations or those historical archiving, if you will.

Paul Solman: And be rescuing art from disaster, says Arius adviser Marco Soriano [b. 1980; entrepreneur and economist].

Marco Soriano, CEO, Soriano Group and Family Office: Pulling the fire that took place in California [Los Angeles County and Ventura County, 7-31 January 2025], where billions of dollars of artwork were burned and not insured properly were lost. The National Museum of Brazil [Rio de Janeiro] also was destroyed [by fire; 2 September 2018], multiple masterpieces that had been there destroyed.

So we would like to preserve that part of culture of our civilization that can easily be erased if it’s not protected properly.

Paul Solman: So how exactly to preserve works forever? You can now create a high-tech laser scanner, apply it to the art.

Patrick Robinson: We scan them to 10 microns, which is the same width of a 10th of the human hair or similar to an actual size of a blood vessel.

Paul Solman: Arius engineering head Roland Dela Cuesta [b. ca. 1971 or 1972; Arius VP of Engineering and Image Production].

Roland Dela Cuesta, Arius Technology: You can see the fine cracks, you can see paint strokes to the level of a three-sable hairbrush. And then on top of that, you get the color.

Paul Solman: And besides solving problems like the Kaplan estate or saving the Mona Lisa:

Patrick Robinson: Making it easier for restorations, for insurance, for valuations. You look at The Girl With the Pearl, when that was restored they used a print on the wall of the museum.

Paul Solman: Did people know that it was not the original? Could they tell?

Patrick Robinson: I would – you know what, Paul? I say, universally, anything we do, no one can tell without knowing.

Paul Solman: The scanner was used to make multiples of contemporary artist Stale Amsterdam’s [pseudonym for Dutch artist (whose birthdate and birth name are unrevealed) known for creating hyper-realistic portraits] portrait of Salvador Dali.

[Stale Amsterdam's portrait of Salvador Dalí is one of his most prominent works. He created multiple original versions of the Dalí portrait, but the 2021 version was the primary subject of a 3D scanning project in London.

[In a major collaboration with Arius Technology and alta Creative Studio, the 2021 original was digitally scanned in ultra-high resolution to create a series of Elegraph monoprints. These prints use “elevated printing technology” to recreate the actual texture and physical depth of the original's 40+ paint layers.]

Patrick Robinson: Just like Andy Warhol [1928-87; American artist and filmmaker] did editions of tomato soup cans with a red background, with a blue background, with a white background, whatever it might be.

Paul Solman: On YouTube, adviser Marco Soriano, an electric motorcycle maker, doesn’t strike you as an old master buff, but he joined the Arius team to expand the business.

Marco Soriano: If you’re the buyer of that piece of art, of artifact, it needs to have some kind of a record so that you can understand what it is. So our technology would, in a certain way, authenticate if that’s real or not.

Paul Solman: He’s also nuts over Piero della Francesca’s [c. 1415-92; Italian painter, mathematician, and geometrist of the Early Renaissance] 15th century Resurrection [fresco; c. 1463-65; in Sansepolcro, then in the Republic of Florence].

Marco Soriano: When I saw it for the first time, it almost made me cry. It has such a strong and meaningful value to all Christianity, to all Catholics in the world.

Paul Solman: Arius is scanning the already damaged fresco.

Adrian Randolph, Northwestern University: That really is a cultural historical object which, spreading it around the world, having other people who can’t travel to Central Italy, in the case of – Italy in the case of Piero della Francesca, that sounds good to me.

Paul Solman: Art historian Adrian Randolph [b. ca. 1964 or 1965] does see potential downsides.

Adrian Randolph: What happens when you have many, many objects which are reproduced? The value of the original might decline. So I assume there could be some sort of financial, what, disruption to the market.

Paul Solman: And aside from the economics is the issue of how we experience art.

Adrian Randolph: Even just in terms of a cultural artifact, does it change its status, which is fascinating and a little destabilizing, I think, for those of us who have always emphasized students and experts going to see the things on site.

Paul Solman: Amy Herman [b. ca. 1965 or 1966], an art historian and educator, cites a German philosopher for inspiration.

Amy Herman, Art Historian and Educator: As Walter Benjamin [1892-1940; German philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist] said so long ago, he said, there never is a perfect copy of a work of art. No such perfect copy ever exists because it’s missing its presence and its time and its place.

[Benjamin articulated this concept in his seminal 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit).]

Paul Solman: Herman too argues that the way we view original art is a singular experience.

Amy Herman: I think that this process of using this 3-D scanner opens our eyes, literally and figuratively, to things that we couldn’t see before, augments our appreciation, but it doesn’t necessarily change that immediacy, that experience of sitting in a Sansepolcro or sitting in Frick’s galleries [Frick Collection; art museum in New York City] and having that one-on-one with the work of art.

Paul Solman: But here in my house, this laser-scanned Burial at Sea by British painter J. M. W. Turner is a pretty singular experience too, and a tangible one.

For the “PBS News Hour,” Paul Solman.

[Paul Solman has been a correspondent for the PBS News Hour since 1985, mainly covering business and economics.

[Diane Lincoln Estes is a producer at PBS News Hour, where she works on economics stories for Making Sen$e, a weekly business and economics broadcast feature every Thursday on the News Hour and online presence updated daily.]

'Greenwood Pond: Double Site'

 

Supplement to “Conserving Modern Art”

[On 11 December 2018, I published "Conserving Modern Art" on Rick On Theater (Rick On Theater: Conserving Modern Art).  It was a post about the conservation and preservation of modern artworks made of experimental and non-traditional materials and in innovative styles that don’t age well or lend themselves easily to cleaning.

[Last month, the New York Times published an article about Mary Miss’s environmental installation in Iowa, Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989-96), that's going to be dismantled because it’s deteriorating and the museum that owns it doesn’t have the money to repair it.  The culprit is “Iowa’s extreme climate,” says the Times, exacerbated by climate change.

[I'm reposting the Times report as a kind of follow-up to "Conserving Modern Art," but I’m going to supplement it with some thoughts of my own, with reference to that 2018 post, as well as several others on related topics that overlap with the circumstances in Iowa.  Those previous posts are: “Books in Print,” 14 July 2010 (Rick On Theater: Books in Print); “We Get Letters,” 7 April 2015 (Rick On Theater: We Get Letters); and “‘The Future of the Past’” by Evan Moffitt (T: The New York Times Style Magazine), 26 October 2023 (Rick On Theater: "The Future of the Past").

[Each of those reports touches on some aspect of preserving and retrieving precarious but precious work of human hands and minds, largely because they were made of or relied on either materials that were innately ephemeral, such as computer-based or video art and electronic and digital documents, or materials that just didn’t stand up to the contemporary environment.]

“HARSH WEATHER AND ECONOMICS IMPERIL LAND ART”
by Julia Halperin 

[Halpern’s report on the potential loss of Mary Miss’s site-specific environmental sculptural installation ran in the “Arts” section (sec. C) of the New York Times on 23 January 2024.  It was posted on the paper’s website on 22 January as “A Leading Land Art Installation Is Imperiled. By Its Patron” (Leading Land Art Work by Mary Miss Is Imperiled by Its Patron - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).

[Biography of Mary Miss, excerpted from Wikipedia, updated on 24 January 2024:

Mary Miss (born May 27, 1944) is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.

Early life and education

Miss was born May 27, 1944, in New York City, but she spent her youth moving every year while living primarily in the western United States.

Miss studied art and received a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966. Miss later received an M.F.A. from the Rhinehart School of Sculpture of Maryland Institute College of Art in 1968.

Influence in public art

As a public artist, Miss is considered a pioneer in environmental art and site-specific art, as well a leading sculptor during the feminist movement of the 1970s. She was a founding member of the journal Heresies. From her earliest work, she has been interested in bringing the specific attributes of a site into focus along with and audience engagement within public space. Miss’ work crosses boundaries between landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, and graphic communication. Her work creates situations that emphasize a site's history, ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed. She has been particularly interested in redefining the role of the artist in the public domain.

In her influential 1979 essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, art critic Rosalind Krauss opens with a description of Mary Miss's, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys. Krauss uses Miss's work to support her examination of sculpture's interdisciplinary nature between architecture and landscape. South Cove (1988), a permanent public project in Battery Park, is a seminal project in Miss' career as it signified new possibilities for artists working in the public realm. The project, located on a three-acre site at the base of the riverfront Esplande, was made in collaboration with architect Stanton Eckstut and landscape designer Susan Child. "South Cove brings the public more intimately in contact with the water than any other component of Battery park City or, indeed, any other Manhattan riverside park."

Miss has worked on the development of the project City as Living Laboratory, which, according to the project's description, collaborates with artists, environmental designers and scientists to focus on and explore sustainability in cities.

Exhibitions

Miss was included in the exhibition Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists at the Aldrich Museum in 1971. Lucy Lippard was the curator, and other artists included Alice Aycock and Jackie Winsor. She was also included in the exhibition Four Young Americans alongside the artists Ann McCoy, Ree Morton, and Jackie Winsor, curated by Ellen H. Johnson and Athena Tacha at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Along with others, Miss's work has been included in the exhibitions Decoys, Complexes and Triggers at the Sculpture Center in New York, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change organized by Lucy Lippard at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 1970s at the Rose Art Museum, and Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern.

Miss has also been the subject of exhibitions at the Harvard University Art Museum, Brown University Gallery, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Architectural Association in London, Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, and the Des Moines Art Center.

Awards and honors

Miss received the New York City American Society of Landscape Architects President's Award in 2010, the American Academy in Rome's Centennial Medal in 2001, and a Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects in 1990. She received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1986. She was awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984, 1975, and 1974. She was named as a distinguished alumni of UC Santa Barbara in 1985.

Personal life

Miss married sculptor Bruce Colvin in 1967, but later divorced in 1986. She is currently married to George Peck, a New York-based artist. They live together in Tribeca where Miss also has her studio.

[Here’s Miss’s own description of Greenwood Pond: Double Site, from her website (GREENWOOD POND: DOUBLE SITE | Mary Miss):

Initiated by the Des Moines Art Center as one of a series of artist¹s installations in the Museum park, the project was developed over a seven year period. Given the number of organizations interested in the park, I decided to collaborate with various local groups to make a place which would operate on several levels: a site which could be layered onto another site and which would have multiple readings. The importance of the park to the immediate neighborhood is made apparent by invoking and building upon layers of associations and memories which have collected over time. Walking around the pond, shifting between overviews and cut-outs within the water surface, the individual visitor is able to trace an intimate view of the place while putting together a new understanding of how it operates visually and physically. Additionally, the makeup and processes of a Midwestern wetlands become clearer as one understands their role in the immediate environment.

Paths lead the viewer to multiple ways of seeing this place. A walkway overhanging the edge of the pond makes it possible to move out over the water. Proceeding around the water’s edge a ramp disappears into the water after getting the visitor down to the level of the pond. The line of this ramp extends in a long arc across the pond marked first by wood pilings and then by a concrete-lined trough cut into the water. Adjacent to this arc, on the land the walkway continues around the edge of the pond past a series of structures, including a pavilion, a mound and a curving wood trellis to form the other side of the ellipse. A large leaf shaped space is outlined by these structures affirming and making palpable the connection between the land and water. The covered pavilion with a seating area inside is built up against the curving mound, which rises almost to the height of the pavilion and seems to wrap it into the landscape.  Continuing around the edge of the pond a small bridge pavilion allows the viewer to descend to the water once again in an area filled with water lilies.  Proceeding further there is an entrance down into a concrete trough where one is able to sit at eye level with the surface of the water; having been kept to the edge, at a distance, the visitor is able to actually enter the pond.  One feels the protection of the concrete walls holding back the pressure of the surrounding water.   Above the trough, on the other side of the path, is a series of stone terraces, on a hillside filled with prairie grass. Movement is key to the experience of the project; the visitor constructs an understanding of the site through the experience the multiple elements and the relationship created between them.

[Let me define some pertinent terms for readers who aren’t up on art jargon.  Site-specific art, for instance, is artwork created for an explicit place.  Habitually, the artist plans and creates the artwork with the exact location in mind.  Site-specific art can include sculpture, graffiti, rock balancing, and other art forms, as well as combinations of forms and materials.  Installations can be in cities, remote natural settings (like Miss’s Greenwood Pond), or even underwater. 

[Site-specific installations can be intended for permanent installation or temporary display, like the wrapping projects of Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009).  The setting of a site-specific artwork is so vital that, as sculptor Richard Serra (b. 1938) said of it: “To move the work is to destroy the work.”

[Environmental art is work that’s planned to surround or involve the participation of spectators in a three-dimensional space to enclose them and involve them in a whole range of sensory experiences—visual, auditory, kinetic, tactile, and sometimes even olfactory.  In other words, the artist creates an environment into which the viewer enters.

[Environmental art often evokes ecological concerns—especially in the era of climate change—but isn’t always so.  The artists are inspired by nature and often use natural materials such as leaves, flowers, branches, ice, soil, sand, stone, and water as the basis of their artwork.  Furthermore, by situating their work in particular places—that is to say, making it site-specific—environmental art often seeks to both transform the way that the site is viewed, while also revealing what was already there.

[Closely allied to environmental art, land art, also known as earth art, means artworks created within the natural environment—but more than that, they’re created from the environment.  It’s art that’s made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks or making structures in the landscape using natural materials such as sand, earth, rocks, twigs, and water found on site.

[Greenwood Pond isn’t so much land art as environmental art because Miss brought in construction materials, principally lumber, that wasn’t earthen or indigenous to the location.  A more precise example of land art is Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson (1938-73) on the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point, Utah, or City (1970-2022) by Michael Heizer (b. 1944) in rural Lincoln County, Nevada.  The sites of land art are often distant from populated areas and therefore fairly inaccessible.  Photo documentation is commonly displayed in urban art galleries and often sold to support the work itself.]

An Iowa museum says it will dismantle a celebrated work because it lacks the money to repair it.

The American land artist and designer Mary Miss was traveling in Europe in October when she received the kind of news that no one in her line of work wants to hear. One of her most significant artworks, owned by an Iowa museum, would need to be closed to the public because it had fallen into disrepair and parts of it were at risk of collapsing.

Six weeks later, Miss heard from the Des Moines Art Center that her environmental installation would be dismantled entirely. The word came from the art center’s new director, Kelly Baum, who said it would cost $2.7 million to repair the project, leaving the museum no choice.

Created between 1989 and 1996, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” is one of the very few environmental installations in the collection of any American museum and is considered to be the first urban wetland project in the country. Its imminent demolition has angered landscape architecture advocates and upset Miss, who is part of a generation of pioneering female land artists receiving renewed scholarly attention.

“The things that have become so important in my later work — engagement of communities, collaboration with scientists, being able to take on something like climate change as an artist and have a seat at the table with politicians and educators — it started there,” Miss, 79, said by phone from her home in Manhattan. With its wooden boardwalk and concrete walkways that curve along the edge of the water and its cantilevered bridges, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” invites passers-by to explore the landscape; viewers can climb up a tower to see the water from above or descend into a sunken structure to experience it at eye level.

The debate over the work’s fate has highlighted the difficulty of preserving public artworks, especially in environments with increasingly extreme weather. A wave of ambitious outdoor projects commissioned in the 1980s and ’90s have, over the past 15 years, required extensive maintenance or repair, according to Leigh Arnold, curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, who included Miss in the celebrated recent exhibition “Groundswell: Women of Land Art” [Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, 23 September 2023-7 January 2024]. The case of “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” is “symptomatic of this greater problem around site-specific installations in that there is this kind of ‘set it and forget it’ attitude,” Arnold said.

In the late ’80s when artists were rethinking what sculpture could look like outside the white-cube gallery space, the Des Moines Art Center invited Miss, along with the sculptors Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, to develop site-specific works for the city-owned park where the museum is situated. Miss chose a derelict pond. Over the course of seven years, she worked with Indigenous communities, a botanist from Iowa State University, and other groups to restore the area to its original wetland state. In its contract with Miss, in 1994, under the former director Michael Danoff, the museum pledged to “reasonably protect and maintain the project against the ravages of time, vandalism, and the elements.”

The museum says that “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” has been “consistently maintained” since its opening. In consultation with the artist, the museum completed extensive repairs in 2014 and 2015, according to Amy Day, its director of external affairs. But the use of residential deck wood, which has a life span of around a decade, was no match for Iowa’s extreme climate.

“We understand very well the desire to re-engineer and rebuild the work,” Day said. “However, Art Center does not have these resources.”

Miss noted that an outdoor project she made with the same materials in St. Louis has been incrementally upgraded over time, just as one might replace floorboards on a porch, and remains in good shape. She led the effort to repair another one of her installations, in South Cove, a public park in Battery Park City [Lower Manhattan, New York City], in 2019.

Much of Miss’s work focuses on making city residents more aware of their surroundings and their connection to the natural world. For South Cove, Miss, along with the landscape architect Susan Child and the architect Stanton Eckstut, transformed a concrete platform above a landfill into a wild seacoast framed by subtle architectural interventions. Writing in The New York Times in 1990, Tony Hiss likened South Cove to New York fixtures like Central Park and Carnegie Hall for its ability to “stretch our understanding of our connections to one another and to the world the city serves.” In 2008, Miss founded City as Living Laboratory, a nonprofit that brings together artists, scientists and urban residents to tackle sustainability issues.

“It is ironic that other examples of Mary’s really ambitious public art projects aren’t in collections of art museums, yet they are cared for in a way that ensures they will continue to be a part of the public landscape,” Arnold, the Nasher curator, said.

The museum said that its agreement with the city of Des Moines to “remedy and/or remove any unsafe conditions related to artwork in Greenwood Park” takes precedence over its agreement with the artist. Ben Page, Des Moines’s director of parks and recreation, said that the city did not demand the work’s removal but supports the museum’s decision.

The treatment of Miss’s installation is symbolic of the art world’s tendency to undervalue environmental art, said Charles Birnbaum, the director of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy group. The organization helped rally support for “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” in 2014 and is leading the opposition to its destruction. “Landscape architecture is treated as a second- or third-class citizen,” Birnbaum said. “Sometimes it comes from a lack of institutional memory — cultural amnesia for what they had.”

Miss said she was “shocked” by the museum’s estimate that it would cost $2.7 million to salvage “Greenwood Pond: Double Site.” She wondered if the work could be repaired in stages, rather than all at once, using a less expensive wood that could, in the future, be replaced at more regular intervals.

Birnbaum suggested that the museum consult the Des Moines Founders Garden Club or other patrons who might have an interest in funding the work’s preservation. (Baum, the director, told Miss she had had “numerous conversations” with the trustees, the city and individuals who helped fund the work’s rehabilitation in 2014.) In a letter sent to Miss on Jan. 17, the museum’s board wrote that any avenue that called for replacing the materials “is not financially feasible and does not comprise reasonable maintenance.” The museum’s operating budget in 2023 was $7.7 million.

For Miss, the decision feels especially ironic given her prominent position in recent exhibitions revisiting women whose contributions had been minimized by mainstream art history. Her work was included in “52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone,” a restaging of a 1971 exhibition organized by the critic Lucy Lippard at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut [6 June 2022-8 January 2023], as well as “Groundswell” at the Nasher. “Having this acknowledgment begin to surface a bit again and then again be erased — again? Really?” Miss said. “It’s just really hard.”

[In November 2007, I went to an exhibit of the work of painter Morris Louis (1912-62) at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (see my report on ROT on 15 February 2010).  Tacked on to the Louis show was an exhibit intended to offer “insights into the Hirshhorn’s groundbreaking conservation techniques developed to preserve and restore poured-paint canvases by various artists.”  This was the origin of my report “Conserving Modern Art.”

[In that post, I recounted this occurrence in my own small art collection:

I had a serious problem . . . with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.  The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist painting, Intermezzo (1958) by Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of what the issue here is.  The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, . . . is one of the most cherished pieces I have—because I love the painting for itself, because it’s the first piece of art I ever owned, and because it was a specially selected present from my parents . . . . 

In the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.  The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.  Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large clumps?  As the paint dried, the globs shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or “scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the canvas.  I knew that if I didn’t do something, I’d lose the painting.  I was frantic.  I even went so far as to write to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now known simply as The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on the third floor of the old main building . . ., the school displayed a larger Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.  I asked if they had encountered the same problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.

At the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in downtown D.C.  I asked him to use his contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save Intermezzo and he did . . . .  In 1987, I ended up paying five times the painting’s purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it to prevent further deterioration. . . .   To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure for a New York second.

[I’m currently working on a collection of letters exchanged between my future parents during World War II.  Today, as I suggest in “We Get Letters,” all their correspondence would be by e-mail or text, and none of it would have survived. 

[Both my parents-to-be saved the letters they received, however, and shortly after they were married, my dad mounted and bound them.  Now, 79 years after they were written, 29 years after my father died and nine years after my mother’s death, I can simply read them! 

[Now, though, I’m confronted with another, related dilemma.  My transcription of the letters and my commentary, all 180-plus pages of it, exists only on my hard disk and, eventually, on my blog.  Both of those are innately evanescent media and require specific technology to retrieve. 

[I’ve been working on the letters project since 2016—that’s eight years of work on and off at a very personally meaningful venture and I would like to preserve it.  I read, appraised, paraphrased or transcribed, interpreted, fact-checked, and commented on 182 pieces of correspondence, and I’m already 77 years old, so I won’t be around a lot longer to pass along this effort unless I can put into some form that’ll last.

[I’ve been considering ways of preserving the eventual post, with my commentary and notes, permanently.  One possibility is a self-published book—though I haven't made any definite decisions yet.  Ironically, that method reverts to an old “technology” that electronic publication is supposed to have supplanted.  (In “Books in Print,” I write about the pleasures of printed books, confessing that “there’s something about a book . . . that makes me resist the idea of e-versions.”)

[How does this all relate to Mary Miss and her Greenwood Pond?  Her environmental installation, my Carton, and the discussion of my parents’ 79-year-old correspondence are all points on a continuum of perishable human artistic and intellectual accomplishment that could—or will—soon be lost forever.

[My letters project is dependent on technology not just for its creation, but for its preservation and retrievability.  I’m only in minimal control of that.  I pointed out in “We Get Letters”: “E-mail”—as well as other forms of electronic writing—"is basically ephemeral . . . .  What’s more, they can’t easily be passed along later to repositories like libraries” or later family members and friends after we’re gone. 

[As investor, public speaker, and writer John Coleman (b. 1981) expressed it in a 2004 Harvard Business Report, “Email is ‘permanent’ in its own way; our electronic messages are easy to keep and search in huge volumes.  But they aren’t tangible and enduring in the same way those old notes are.”

[(In 2015, I came across a cache of letters my father sent to my mother while they were apart for a month in 1962, when my dad was in Germany before my mother joined him.  I transcribed them and posted them as “Home Alone” on 12. 15, and 18 June 2015.  If e-mail or texting had existed 62 years ago, would I have even found those messages?)

[As for the Carton and Greenwood Pond, they are both vulnerable because of the materials from which they’re made.  Norman Carton’s painting wasn’t made with experimental pigments; the oil paint he used was the same as that used by artists for decades.  What was new was the way he applied it to the canvas: thickly, just as it came out of the tube.  Artists had only just begun to use that technique, so no one knew how it would perform over time.

[I doubt it was something anyone—artists, collectors, gallerists, curators—was concerned about when Carton and his contemporaries starting experimenting with impasto.  How could they know that 30 years after Intermezzo was painted, 25 years after my parents gave it to me for my 14th birthday, and 5 years after the artist died, trouble would start to appear.

[Mary Miss didn’t use particularly new-fangled materials or innovative techniques to build Greenwood Pond: Second Site.  In fact, she used basic materials—treated lumber, metal mesh, steel, stone, and concrete, all easily repaired or replaced.  What she and the curators and directors of the Des Moines Art Center didn’t reckon on was the effects on an outdoor installation of Iowa’s harsh winter climate, particularly with the added battering of climate change.  On an annual budget of $7.7 million, the museum says it can’t afford the $2.7 million to repair Greenwood Pond.

[The DMAC announced last October that “public access” to the work has been “temporarily suspended” while it undergoes a “complete structural review.”  Soon after that, however, with no substantial consultation with Miss, the museum notified the artist of the decision to demolish Greenwood Pond.  Miss said she’s “shocked that this decision has been reached so quickly on the future of Greenwood Pond: Double Site.”

[The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a non-profit that “educates and engages the public to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards,” suggests the DMAC has not fulfilled its contractual obligation to “reasonably protect and maintain” the work.

[TCLF is calling for the DMAC to reverse its demolition decision and, instead, to engage in meaningful consultations with Miss and others to find a solution that restores the artwork and develops a long-term, ongoing maintenance plan.  The organization has raised many questions regarding the DMAC’s decision, laid out on its website at Acclaimed Artist Mary Miss’ Renowned Land Art Installation "Greenwood Pond: Double Site" to be Torn Down by Des Moines Art Center | TCLF.  Among these are: what are the DMAC’s maintenance conservation protocols concerning permanent works in its collection and how were they applied to this artwork? and how and why did the DMAC permit Greenwood Pond: Double Site to deteriorate to the point where demolition was thought to be the only option?

[Julia Halperin is a freelance arts and culture journalist, writing monthly column for the Art Newspaper, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Financial Times.  After working her way up through the ranks at the Art Newspaper to museums editor, Halperin was appointed executive editor of Artnet News in 2017.  She co-founded the Burns Halperin Report in 2020, which has become an influential indicator of inclusivity in the art world.]