Reputation laundering and museum collections: patterns, priorities, provenance, and hidden crime

Figures & data

Figure 1. a and b: Patterson’s donations to the Brooklyn Museum. Screenshot of the museum’s digital catalogue taken by Yates, 7 July 2022.

Figure 2a. a and b: some of the low-value items that were part Patterson’s NGV donation scheme. Screen shot taken of the NGV collections database by Yates, 21 July 2023.

Figure 2b. (Continued)

Table 1. Objects donated to museums by Leonardo Patterson; our list as of mid 2023.

Donation Year	Museum	Accession/Catalogue Number	Description	URL
1968	National Museum of the American Indian	Unknown	“one fragmentary item from El Salvador”	This item is not currently on the museum’s online database but was confirmed in response to our query.
1968	American Museum of Natural History	30.3/1098 A and B	Fragmentary earspools listed as Costa Rican	Unavailable at the time of writing, collections database undergoing extended systems maintenance.
1969	American Museum of Natural History	30.2/1256	Vase listed as from El Salvador	Unavailable at the time of writing, collections database undergoing extended systems maintenance.
1969	Brooklyn Museum	69.17.01	Ceramic whistle shaped like a dog	https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/95988
1969	Brooklyn Museum	69.17.02	Seated figure listed as Pre-classic	https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/95989
1978	Minneapolis Institute of Art	78.32	Figurine head listed as Olmec	https://collections.artsmia.org/art/21958/head-olmec
1978	Minneapolis Institute of Art	78.86	Seated figurine listed as Olmec	https://collections.artsmia.org/art/21918/seated-figure-with-flaming-eyebrows-olmec
1979	National Gallery of Australia	79.794	Whistle/ocarina in the shape of a human head	Although recorded in the museum’s annual for 1979 (National Gallery of Australia 1979), the museum says the object has been unlocated since 1980/81 and may have never been received
1980	National Gallery of Australia^12	80.4322	A vase with flying fox feet	Not on the museum’s online database, presence confirmed by representatives of the museum
1980	National Gallery of Australia	80.875.A–D	A group of pendants	Not on the museum’s online database, presence confirmed by representatives of the museum
1981	Minneapolis Institute of Art^13	81.62	Small figurine listed as Jalisco	https://collections.artsmia.org/art/22948/figure-jalisco
1984	British Museum	Am1984,06.1	Inlaid human teeth listed as from Chiapas	https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am1984-06-1

Figure 3. Patterson’s donations to the AMNH. Screen shot taken of the AMNH online collections database by Yates on 23 February 2023.

Figure 4. a and b: above, three of the obsidian “labrets” from the Patterson objects in the NGV; below, two strikingly similar obsidian “ear plugs” among the Merrin donations to the AMNH. Screen shot taken of the NGV online collections database and of a pdf supplied by AMNH by Yates on 21 July 2023.

National Gallery of Australia. 1979. Australian National Gallery Review 1978/79. Canberra.

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Data availability statement

Our computational notebooks and our original knowledge graph CSV file are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7506971 and may be run using Jupyter on a personal computer, or online via Google’s Colab service; for use on a personal computer, a GPU is recommended. Source code for our use of the OpenAI large language model to create a knowledge graph is available from: https://github.com/XLabCU/gpt3-relationship-extraction-to-kg; Archived source code at time of publication: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860733 (Graham, Yates, and El-Roby 2023). In that latter repository, the original code for ‘python_api.py’ is copyright Sixing Huang released under the MIT License. Our additional code (‘split_resize.sh’) is released under the MIT No Attribution License.