Shelby White, a trustee emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose personal collection of antiquities has been the subject of public scrutiny as well as government seizure, has been appointed to the Met’s task force to help shape stricter practices regarding cultural property and the handling of looted and stolen art, the New York Times reports.

White—a Giving Pledge signatory and the founder of the Leon Levy Foundation, named for her husband, who died in 2003—is a major financial supporter of the Met and a key contributor to its antiquities collections.

In the past two years, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU) has seized 71 looted artifacts from White’s New York City home. In April, ATU seized an additional 17 items at the Met, including a Chinese funerary artifact found caked with dirt in a crate that had been in storage at the museum for 20 years. The 89 objects seized are collectively worth nearly $69 million. In 2005, a major gift from White was revealed to include objects looted from Italy, which were repatriated in 2008. The most recent seizures are considered a blow to White, who is regarded as “one of the most celebrated philanthropists of her generation, someone with a demonstrated zeal for preserving the treasures of the past and advancing a broader understanding of the ancient world,” the Times reports.

Though standards for acquiring antiquities have become stricter in recent decades, critics have described White’s collecting practices as naïve or careless. “There is no way that someone at her level of the market and her depth of collecting and her prominence at the Met…did not know they should be asking for things like export licenses,” Elizabeth Marlowe, Colgate University director of museum studies, told the Times.

Apart from the ethical impropriety of possessing looted artifacts, there has been no indication of criminality. In May 2023, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office thanked White for her assistance and cooperation with their investigation.

White and her husband acquired their collection “in good faith, at public auction, and from dealers they believed to be reputable,” Peter A. Chavkin, a lawyer for White, said in a statement to the Times. “If an item in her collection was shown to have been wrongfully taken by others, Ms. White has expeditiously and voluntarily returned it to its rightful place of origin.”

While no longer a voting trustee, White remains on the museum’s acquisitions, buildings, and finance committees and was recently appointed to the Met’s 12-member task force, which will offer “their experience and counsel” to help shape stricter collecting practices at the museum.

“[Should] a trustee be a model of conduct when it pertains to the purpose of the museum itself?” said Patty Gerstenblith, an expert on cultural heritage issues at DePaul University College of Law. “Her collecting practices do not fit the model of how a museum should be pursuing knowledge and preserving the historical record.”

(Photo credit: Wikimedia/Sailko)