Krannert Art Museum has reopened its reimagined exhibition 'Fragmented Histories: Andean Art before 1600' after a year-long closure, following nearly a decade of collaborative research. Co-curators Allyson Purpura and Kasia Szremski worked with pre-contact Andean art historians and Peruvian archaeologists to restore context to looted artifacts from the Fred Olsen Collection, donated in 1967. The exhibition is organized into four themes—Unfinished Stories, The Mobile Life of Objects, Powerful Images, and Object Biographies—and includes digital displays that acknowledge the violent histories of looting and aim to share knowledge with descendant communities in Peru.
This exhibition matters because it models a reparative approach to displaying looted archaeological objects, directly confronting the fragmentation—both physical and contextual—caused by colonial extraction. By prioritizing relationship-building with Peruvian museums and descendant communities, the curators transform a permanent collection into a platform for knowledge exchange and heritage repatriation. The show also sets a precedent for how museums can ethically present ancient art while being transparent about provenance gaps and the ongoing legacies of looting.