The Penn Museum, formerly called the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has updated its Human Remains Policy, declaring that the museum will no longer exhibit exposed human remains. Mummies and vessels containing human body parts can be presented, but there will be no more bones, hair, tissue. The decision follows controversy the Penn Museum has faced over its handling of a body recovered at the site of the MOVE bombing in 1985, where the remains of one of the victims of the police explosion of the rowhouse housing MOVE, a radical Black separatist group, were taken to forensics at the university and remained in the museum.
The change in policy at Penn also reflects a larger reckoning at many institutions regarding the display of human remains, which may have been added to collections in unaccountable ways and can often be traced back to Indigenous, enslaved and otherwise marginalised populations. In ArtReview, Oliver Basciano investigated the Penn Museum’s neighbour the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and their decision to remove some of the bodies in its collection from view. Basciano discussed the conflicted relationship between historic institutions and the collections they are meant to care for. ‘At what point does the human body stop being human (at which point exhibiting it becomes ok, we might assume)? At what point does the owner of the body relinquish said ownership?’ Basciano wrote. ‘These questions are also related to the wider questions of restitution that museums are considering today, and concerns dealing with the ethics of how such objects came into collections and what retrospectively should be done next.’
