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Hi there, everyone. It's Jennifer, your art curious host. Back at you this week with our

short form Friday roundup of my

favorite art history updates and interesting news bits. This is Art Curious News this week,

and this gets you up to date on some of the most interesting goings on in the realm of art history.

So, all right, let's do this. Today is August 5th, 2022. And as you might expect from

recent stories that we have shared here and potentially that you've seen elsewhere in the news,

there has been a lot more stuff going on on the repatriation front. And it is more good news

about the so-called Benin bronzes.

Less than a month after Germany and Nigeria finalized their negotiations for restitution,

two top universities in the UK are following suit.

This week, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge both announced

that they will be returning hundreds of Benin bronzes following a formal request submitted earlier this year by the Nigerian government to Oxford's museums, the Ashmolean and the Pitt Rivers, as well as to Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, the Benin bronzes were purportedly looted by British troops who had ransacked Benin City, which is now part of modern-day Nigeria, all the way back in 1897.

And it was after that point that the pieces were dispersed to various British collections and also then to other museums around the world.

They have been at the center of a debate about museums and who gets to own particular

cultural objects, and Nigeria has been calling for their repatriation for upwards of 50 years,

5-0.

...