New Year!

Welcome to a New Year, 2020, and to the first blog post for our new webpage – stealingculture.org. We are dedicated to focusing on the criminal and cultural implications of acquiring artwork and artifacts. To this project, we bring decades of experience, one as a former prosecutor and current professor of law and the other as a current university museum chief curator with years of previous experience in the for-profit gallery and auction business. Our webpage and our blog are meant to be additional avenues for us to critically think, communicate, analyze, and engage with our communities in every way possible.

Stealing Culture encompasses all of the ideas and concepts that come to mind when you uncouple those words. Stealing suggests theft. Theft might be of a tangible item, a concept, individuals, and more. From just those words alone, one can envision the intersection of stealing with culture. Culture brings to mind the social behavior of human societies bound together by their thoughts, their creations, their beliefs, and more. From the beginning of time, cultures have, individually or collectively, clashed, combined, developed, and been wiped from the face of earth. But in the good and the bad, our culture is part of our identity, the identity that is placed upon each of us as well by society as the identity we ascribe to ourselves.

Stealing Culture owes an enormous amount of gratitude to one particular professor, her vision, and her program. Without Professor Caroline McCracken-Flesher and the University of Wyoming in Scotland program, this project would never have been born or found the support needed to grow. To all those reading this post, we cannot overstate the brilliance and drive she brings to any endeavor she undertakes. We hope that as we strengthen our wings, teaming with new and inspired supporters along the way, we continue to make Professor McCracken-Flesher and our initial supports proud.

This brief post is meant to provide a quick glance of what Stealing Culture is and can become. We will post regularly so please return to our website often. We look forward to and welcome your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions. We will engage in vigorous debate and we will do that in a way that ALL know they are welcome at the table.

Thank you for joining in our journey,

-       Stealing Culture

PHOTO: Original cohort of University of Wyoming faculty at Abbotsford House, Home of Sir Walter Scott, Scotland, 2017, where the initial discussions, and arguments, of Stealing Culture began.