DENVER — The Denver Art Museum has formally removed a looted Benin plaque from its collection — the first step toward repatriating a prized relic that the British plundered in West Africa more than a century ago.
The move to “deaccession,” or remove, the item from the museum’s collection earlier this month comes as collections around the globe are reexamining, and outright returning, items in their possession that were pillaged during colonial rule.
Denver’s storied art museum in 1955 acquired the 16th- or 17th-century bronze plaque from the Carlebach Gallery in New York. It’s one of the so-called “Benin Bronzes” that once adorned the royal palace of the oba, or king, of Benin in what’s now southern Nigeria.
