Category: Faculty Story

Jennifer Saracino, an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Arizona School of Art, has received a Barbara Thom postdoctoral fellowship from the prestigious Huntington Library near Los Angeles for the 2023-24 school year.

The fellowship will allow Saracino to revise her dissertation on the Uppsala Map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan into her first book manuscript. Uppsala is the earliest known map of Mexico City, painted by indigenous Nahua artists after the Spanish Conquest (c. 1540).

“I’m so honored that they’ve recognized the significance of my project,” Saracino said. “The Huntington Library has always been an institution of which I’m dreamed of becoming a fellow. The strengths of their collections include the Hispanic Americas, Maps & Manuscripts and the history of science. These are all avid research interests of mine, so it is an ideal setting in which to carry out my research and manuscript revision.

“Not to mention, it’s absolutely stunning,” she said. “I’m really drawn to the fact that it has a research library, art museum and botanical gardens. It’s the perfect fit for an interdisciplinary art historian like myself.”

Saracino grew up in Western Pennsylvania but received her B.A. in Art History from the University of Southern California, not that far from the Huntington Library.

“I’m very excited to go back to my old stomping grounds and spend some time by the coast,” Saracino said. “Much of my Filipino family also lives in Los Angeles, so I’m excited to be able to spend more time with them.”

The Huntington complex, in San Marino, Caliornia, is one of the world’s top independent research libraries, with over 11 million items from the 11th to the 21st centuries. The Thom fellowships, lasting nine to 12 months, include a $50,000 stipend and are intended to support non-tenured faculty who are revising their dissertation for publication as their first monograph.

In the past, Saracino said art historical scholarship regarded the Uppsala Map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan as having a pronounced European influence compared to other Indigenous-made manuscripts of the same time period.

“I felt that a deeper analysis of the map was missing because of this,” she said. “These artists were extraordinary cultural brokers between the local European and Indigenous populations. They were fluent not only in multiple spoken and written languages but also visual languages.

“As the daughter of an immigrant and someone with my own multicultural identity, I felt that these artists were owed more recognition in the scholarship as the extraordinary individuals that they were,” Saracino said. “I wanted to explore what it meant to hold multiple identities and how that is reflected in their representation of the dynamically changing world in which they were living.”

Last fall, Saracino presented a paper, “The Ayer Map of Teotihuacan as Embodied Action & Performance,” after being invited to the 21st Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr. Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

She also enjoyed participating in an interdisciplinary exhibition that saw University of Arizona professors across departments imagine how a Charles Dickens tale, “David Copperfield,” might find a homeland in the Sonoran Borderlands. From digital installation to performance, sonic experiments to film, cartography to micro-publication, the exhibition explored questions about the relationship between arts and public-engagement, literature and everyday places, and authors and readers.

“Art History is important because it allows us all to learn about different people, cultures, values and worldviews through the things they made,” Saracino said.

After earning her undergrad degree from USC, she received her master’s and Ph.D. in Art History from Tulane University in New Orleans. She was a junior fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection in Washington, D.C., then taught at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida, before coming to the University of Arizona in August 2021.

Saracino co-organized a panel, “Ecocritical Art Histories of Indigenous Latin America” on Feb. 18 at the College Art Association (CAA) conference in New York City.

“Art History has broadened my worldview and afforded me the opportunity and privilege to travel the world and meet so many different people,” she said. “I think that to learn about others and their artistic and cultural traditions instills in you a greater empathy and appreciation for difference and diversity.”

Just weeks after Sama Alshaibi was formally inducted as a Regents Professor, a mid-career solo exhibition of the Iraqi-born artist began in the United Arab Emirates.

The Arizona Board of Regents honored the School of Art professor during the University of Arizona’s Outstanding Faculty Awards Ceremony on Feb. 15 at Crowder Hall.

In large part to Alshaibi’s contributions, the school’s Photography, Video and Imaging program has grown substantially and is ranked No. 3 in the U.S. News & World Report’s list of best photography schools.

“We are in awe of your impact,” said John Milbauer, associate dean for Faculty Affairs for the College of Fine Arts, who introduced Alshaibi at the ceremony.

“Tell it to the River,” a mid-career survey of Alshaibi’s work, started Feb. 27 at the Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, UAE. The solo exhibition, which runs through June 30, 2023, brings together significant parts of her practice over the last two decades.

The exhibition debuts two commissions, one of them inaugurating Alshaibi’s 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and the other marking the closing chapter of an eight-year long photographic series. The two new projects mark the return of Alshaibi to her homeland of southern Iraq following a 40-year displacement.

Alshaibi’s work “explores the notion of aftermath — the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and a community following the destruction of their social, natural and built environments,” Milbauer told the audience on Feb. 15.

In her photographs and videos, Alshaibi often uses her own body as both subject and medium.

“Your work is exemplary, as your professional accolades demonstrate: an extensive list of fellowships, exhibitions, publications and awards on both national and international levels,” Milbauer said.

Among those accolades, in addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, are an exhibition at the 2014 Venice Biennale, a monograph published by Aperture (“Sand Rushes In”), a 2014 Fulbright research fellowship to the West Bank city of Ramallah and a 2019 Artpace International Artist Residency in San Antonio.

Regent Larry Edward Penley formally inducted Alshaibi as a Regents Professor on Feb. 15.

Earlier Provost Liesel Folks, senior vice president for Academic Affairs, told the audience that the Regents Professor is “the highest honor the university system can bestow on a faculty member.” The honor is “reserved for faculty scholars with exceptional ability who have achieved national and international distinction while maintaining a robust portfolio of student-facing work,” Folks said.

Alshaibi joined the School of Art in 2006. In her field, she is among the most sought-after presenters, having given nearly 100 presentations, and among the most frequently cited visual artists, with more than 200 citations. Her work has also been featured in recent exhibitions such as “Women in the Face of History and Migration(s)” and “Meaning in Art.”

Four other University of Arizona faculty members were formally named 2022 Regents Professors: Jean-Luc Brédas (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Juanita L. Merchant (Gastroenterology and Hepatology), David Pietz (History) and Donata Vercelli (Cellular and Molecular Medicine).

A group of University of Arizona faculty members and their community partners have launched a public archive containing the stories of asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants incarcerated in Arizona.

The DETAINED: Voices from the Migrant Incarceration System project is a collaborative effort involving UArizona, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project and Salvavision. The Florence Project provides free legal and social services to individuals in immigration detention in Arizona. Salvavision is a Tucson-based organization that provides aid and support to asylum-seekers and migrants displaced in the remote town of Sasabe, in Sonora, Mexico.

The DETAINED archive is available online.

The archive grew out of School of Art Professor David Taylor’s decades-long focus on the nature and changing circumstances of the borderlands – an interest he developed after moving from the East Coast and thinking about the tropes that make up society’s conception of Western history. A photographer, Taylor said any story he told would not be that of a person who personally crossed the border or someone seeking asylum or work. Instead, he strives to let those people tell their own stories.

“My goal in all of this is to ensure that people’s experiences do not disappear. These are people who don’t get to write history. They don’t usually have their say,” Taylor said.

Taylor worked alongside professor of English Susan Briante, author and translator Francisco Cantú, School of Information graduate student Aems Emswiler, College of Law alumnus David Blanco, former UArizona associate professor Anita Huizar Hernández and staff from the Florence Project to interview a dozen former detainees of the detention centers in Florence and Eloy. Those interviews were recorded, transcribed and translated for the archive. The team also collected images of artwork and memorabilia provided by detainees.

Cantú, who works alongside Briante as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program for the UArizona Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing, said detention facilities are the most underreported and least understood facet of border enforcement. A general lack of public awareness creates a need to tell the stories of directly impacted individuals, Cantú said.

“These are places that are very rarely infiltrated and seen, and it’s very hard for stories to come out of these spaces,” he said. “We want people to realize this is happening right now on the scale that it is. The archive has a real pulse, a heartbeat.”

A Digital Borderlands Grant of nearly $60,000 was awarded for the establishment of the DETAINED archive. The three-year, $750,000 Digital Borderlands project was funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. University of Arizona Libraries disburses those funds to projects that “support the integration of library services into data-intensive, humanities-focused research on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.”

“The Mellon grant has been really enormous just to get this project going, and our partnership with the Florence Project is fundamental to this work,” Briante said. “Now, we are committed to seeing it continue.”

By Andy Ober
University Communications

Willem de Kooning‘s painting “Woman-Ochre” has been in the international spotlight, thanks to its return to the University of Arizona Museum of Art more than three decades after a man and woman swiped the work of art in 1985. However, the painting held a significant place in the art world well before the audacious theft.

When “Woman-Ochre” goes on exhibit at the museum on Saturday, Oct. 8, visitors will have the opportunity to take in one of the most important examples of abstract expressionism, which was the United States’ first big painting movement.

Paul Ivey, professor in the UArizona College of Fine Arts‘ School of Art, shared four things you may not have known about “Woman-Ochre” and de Kooning:

De Kooning started with a different kind of painting when he first came to the United States.

De Kooning was born in the Netherlands in 1904 and moved to the United States in 1926.

“When de Kooning came to America, he didn’t think there was any painting here – he thought that art was something they only had in Europe,” Ivey said.

When he arrived in New Jersey, de Kooning found work as a house painter. Ivey said the artist’s time in that job had an influence on the materials he used as he grew as a painter.

“He used oil paints mostly,” Ivey said. “‘Woman-Ochre’ is an oil painting. He often used house paints that he was familiar with. While many artists of the time used paint from tubes, he often used paint from cans.”

“Woman-Ochre” was a late addition to a series of paintings that put de Kooning on the map.

De Kooning was one of the better-known artists from the abstract expressionist movement, which emerged in New York in the 1940s. The style is defined in part by expressive brushstrokes and the impression of spontaneity.

De Kooning became a major player in the movement with his “Woman” series – a collection of six paintings focused on the female figure that he produced from 1950-1953.

“Woman-Ochre,” which de Kooning finished in 1955, displays the vigorous brushwork that was a staple of his art while also highlighting his meticulous approach to his work.

“The ‘Woman’ series, when it was shown, was highly controversial and really put him on the map,” Ivey said. “Some saw it as anti-abstract expressionism because it had a figure in it, but he defended himself, saying that even abstract forms needed a likeness.”

“Woman-Ochre,” which de Kooning finished in 1955, displays the vigorous brushwork that was a staple of his art while also highlighting his meticulous approach to his work.

“The people who worked in his studio said he was a very deliberate painter,” Ivey explained. “It looks like it’s just slapdash, but in fact he was fairly slow. He would have really fast moments where he would paint, but then he’d step back, sometimes even for a day, before he’d go back in.”

The inspirations for “Woman-Ochre” came nearly 30,000 years apart.

The female form fascinated de Kooning, Ivey said, and he found two sources of inspiration for his “Woman” series, separated by tens of thousands of years of history.

“He collected advertising for cigarettes where you would often see buxom women with very large smiles, although ‘Woman-Ochre’ doesn’t have the smile he often used,” Ivey said. “He also looked back at ritual sculptures and pre-historical works of buxom and rounded women that were seen as early fertility symbols.”

An example of the ancient artwork that fascinated de Kooning is the Venus of Willendorf, a nearly 30,000-year-old figurine discovered over 100 years ago in an Austrian village.

“Woman-Ochre” is a centerpiece of a lasting legacy at the museum.

“Woman-Ochre” is one of the centerpieces of a substantial art donation made to the University of Arizona Museum of Art by Baltimore businessman Edward Gallagher Jr. as a memorial to his son, Edward Gallagher III, who died in an accident at age 13. The collection contains nearly 200 works of art that were donated between 1954 and 1978.

“You can’t underestimate the significance of the Gallagher collection,” Ivey said.

As for why Gallagher chose the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Ivey said Tucson had a special place in Gallagher’s heart.

“Gallagher started to collect artwork during that era. He would come out here to go to dude ranches during the winter, so it was the tourism of the area that attracted him to Tucson,” Ivey said.

EXTRA INFO

“Restored: The Return of ‘Woman-Ochre’” will be on exhibit at UAMA Oct. 8-May 20. More information is available at the Arizona Arts website.

Not only did Margaret Bailey Doogan inspire students in the classroom, she also was an outspoken advocate for women artists and designers across the nation.

Doogan, a School of Art professor emerita whose acclaimed paintings and drawings addressed issues of women and aging in society, died July 4 in Tucson. She was 80.

“With powerful imagery, combining bite and humor, she called out sexism and misogyny in academia as well as in the Tucson art community and the art world,” said Ellen McMahon, a School of Art professor and associate dean for research in the College of Fine Arts.

Doogan, taught for 30 years at the University of Arizona, retiring in 1999. She mentored McMahon, a graduate student who took all three design courses that Doogan taught.

“Studying graphic design with Peggy inspired me to see everything with fresh eyes and to fall in love with subtle details of typographic design,” said McMahon, who earned her M.S. in Scientific Illustration. “Several years later, when Peggy’s focus changed from design to painting, I was hired into her line in the School of Art — a position I still occupy.”

Barbara Penn, a School of Art professor emerita, said Doogan “felt a genuine love for her students — articulate and encouraging when giving feedback on their work, while she also worked hard in her studio. She was one of the very favorite professors to her students … and they have not forgotten her.”

After Doogan retired from academia, she continued to display her work at exhibitions locally and nationally, including an important piece in the permanent collection at the Brooklyn Museum, a large charcoal, pastel canvas commemorating Mairead Farrell, an Irish rebel shot to death.

Doogan, who earned her BFA in Illustration from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadephia, came to Tucson in 1969 after working for an advertising firm in New York, where she designed iconic logos such as the Morton Salt girl, “Mortie.”

She earned a master’s degree in animated film from UCLA in 1977. Doogan’s thesis film, “Screw: A Technical Love Poem,” compared the language of love to pieces of hardware and was shown worldwide in film festivals.

The University of Arizona Museum of Art held multiple shows featuring her work, including “Articulate,” in which she traveled across the U.S. interviewing prominent women in the art world. The show featured larger-than-life, mixed-media portraits of the women, with stereo speakers beside each playing edited recordings of Doogan’s interviews.

For her “Punch and Judy” series, Doogan created expressionistic oil paintings, using multiple panels and language to illustrate society’s perception of women and male/female relationships.

In a 2005 interview with the Tucson Weekly, Doogan talked about why she portrayed the bodies of older women in her art.

“There are very few artists who have not portrayed the body as ideal,” Doogan told Weekly reporter Margaret Reagan, listing Rembrandt, Thomas Eakins, Lucian Freud and Alice Neel among the “rebels.”

“I deal with the real body,” Doogan said. “Our bodies are diaries of our experience. Whatever happens to us is recorded there: wrinkles, scars, the way we stand. That specificity fascinates me. I think it’s beautiful.”

• • •

McMahon and Penn elaborated on Doogan’s life in a Q&A with the School of Art.

Q. Could you talk more about Peggy’s contributions to the university and art community?

McMahon: When she joined the art department, there was only one other women in the studio area. She fought tirelessly to usher in women throughout the 1980s until the ratio of male to female was equal. I was one of the fortunate women she supported.

A story about her: As she was building her national career as an artist, to get around the gender bias in the art world, she began using the name “Bailey Doogan,” so her gender wasn’t identifiable by potentially biased jurors and curators.

Penn: Professor Doogan was a great mentor to me as well, in my teaching. The job was constant for all of us, and yet she found time to share ideas. Bailey offered stories of how inequality eventually changed to equality, when the numbers of women professors became equal to the numbers of male professors. This included the School of Art’s professors in Art Education, Art History, Studio Art and Graphic Design.

Bailey was lauded in Tucson by her community and her colleagues. She exhibited her work in Tucson often, and she had many local fans — all while she was becoming known for her art, nationally and internationally. She also was very active in the College Art Association; the largest convening of art historians, artists, and visual arts professionals that annually awards a Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. She worked many years as a CAA Committee Leader, and as such, her reach extended to artists and professors across the United States. Hers was a decisive voice for those whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole.

Q. What are some of your favorite memories about Prof. Doogan?

McMahon: I’ll share two of her stories that made a big impression on me when I was her student. After graduating with a BFA in Illustration Peggy went to work for a New York advertising firm, very much like the one dramatized in the TV show “Mad Men.” She was very young and the only female creative. She got the assignment to redraw the little girl holding the umbrella who was the mascot for Morton Salt (I just checked my cupboard and she is still on the package.) She told about endlessly uncomfortable meetings with powerful middle-aged ad men who kept wanting her to make the little girl’s skirt shorter and shorter.

The other story is more upbeat. The firm got the job to design the Yuban coffee can in the 1960s. At the time, all the major brands were using bright colors like red, blue and yellow. She proposed a brown can. Her co-workers and the client had their doubts, but she pushed for it. She used to say proudly, “Go look at the coffee aisle in the supermarket and now more than half of the packaging is brown.” Her design was also ahead of its time, featuring a photograph of a woman with a Jackie Kennedy haircut sipping from a streamlined, distinctly modern coffee cup.

Penn: Professor Jackson Boelts had a connection to artists and designers in Poland, and had traveled there on a design project. Jackson, who knew Professor Doogan well, had made arrangements for her to attend Organizatorzy Pleneru — an artist retreat in Julin, Poland. That week, the plumbing in Doogan’s house  failed and broke all the pipes in her front yard. Both Bailey and Jackson very kindly asked me to take Bailey’s place at the artist residency. … This was such an opportunity — a real gift to visit Poland. My work was included in the exhibition at the residency and at another gallery location in Julin, Poland. Two years later, I was invited to return to Poland once again, and … my work was exhibited at the magnificent Wanda Siemaszkowa Theatre, in Rzeszow. …

Three years (after I was hired in 1991), there was a need for a painter and another faculty member was willing to take on my Foundations position. Professor Doogan, known for being forthright in the School of Art, stood high on behalf of me; then the group of painters voted to bring me into the Painting Area. Ten years younger than Doogan, I always looked up to her. She supported her female colleagues, and she always supported me and my work. It meant so much.

• • •

In a 1985 Women’s Art Journal issue, University of Arizona Professor of Art History Sheldon Reich wrote an essay on Doogan and her artwork, saying she “has the right to dare anything.”

“Through her painting, she is reaching out to the rest of us,” Reich wrote, “reaching out to share her responses to life-loneliness, disappointment, love, and, above all, what it means to be a woman in America.”

• Arizona Daily Star appreciation
• Doogan’s obituary at Dignity Memorial site
• Bailey Doogan’s Wikipedia page

Speaking English with a French accent, the woman in the voicemail said she had a collection of artifacts she acquired from the African country of Mauritania in the late 1980s.

The message Irene Bald Romano received in May was intriguing but not exceptional.

As an art historian and archaeologist, and an expert on Greek and Roman antiquities, Romano occasionally fields calls from federal investigators about confiscated artifacts. She also gets the odd message from someone curious to know more about an item they’ve acquired.

But this message felt different, said Romano, a professor in the University of Arizona School of Art who also holds an appointment in the School of Anthropology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The woman, in her message, explained she had acquired the artifacts – an assortment of stone tools, pieces of pottery, arrowheads, hair beads, and some natural history items that all fit into a textbook-sized plastic case – during her time as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. She seemed committed to ensuring the artifacts find a suitable home, perhaps in a local museum or at a school where students could learn from them.

But ideally, the woman said, they would be returned to Mauritania.

And the matter was urgent.

“She said in that message, ‘I’m dying of cancer, and I really need to figure out what to do with this,'” Romano said. “She sounded so sincere that I thought this was something I should follow up on.”

Her instincts to follow up paid off.

That voicemail kicked off a seven-month process to return the items to Mauritania. The effort culminated with Mamadou Baro, an associate professor of anthropology who is from Mauritania and specializes in the region, traveling to his home country this month to present the items to Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, as well as ambassadors to Mauritania from the U.S., France, Germany and Morocco and representatives from the country’s Ministry of Culture, national museum and University of Nouakchott, in the country’s capital.

The collection also has become a catalyst for a new partnership between UArizona, the national museum and the University of Nouakchott that will give students at both universities opportunities to team up on research and other projects related to anthropology, museum studies and other areas.

“This tiny thing is bringing many people together,” Baro said. “We always talk about collaboration, but this is becoming more real.”

A Woman With a ‘Museum Curator’s Mind’

Born near the Bay of Biscay in western France in the spring of 1946, Marie-France Racette fell in love with deserts during a trip to Algeria in 1984.

She married an American, joined the U.S. Peace Corps, and volunteered for the federal aid agency in Mauritania from 1987-1989. Her work as an agricultural extension agent involved training locals in vegetable gardening, irrigation and date palm management.

In the 1990s, she continued to do similar work in northern Haiti.

She came to Tucson in 2003 and worked at Tucson High Magnet School, first as a receptionist and later as a substitute French teacher. She retired in 2012 but stayed busy working part time for The Loft Cinema and attending UArizona classes and workshops.

By the time Racette called university experts about her collection, she had held onto the artifacts for more than 30 years.

She had meticulously documented and cared for the items, making her own catalog with descriptions of all the pieces and details on where she got them. Many items she found in the desert. Others she bought in shops. Some were gifts from locals.

“She had a kind of museum curator’s mind,” Romano said.

Soon after the phone call, Romano went to visit Racette in her apartment in Tucson to view the collection. After discussing options, Romano agreed to be responsible for the collection and find an appropriate home for it.

The Arizona State Museum, where Romano is curator of Mediterranean archaeology, does not collect African objects, and Romano didn’t know of another museum in Tucson that would take them. She told Racette that perhaps a local high school would find educational value in the collection. Repatriation of the artifacts to Mauritania was also likely an option but would require more investigation.

A Country Working to Preserve its Past

The Islamic Republic of Mauritania, as the country is officially known, had long faced – and was still facing – a challenging period of conflict by the time Racette arrived there in the late 1980s.

There was little interest in preserving archaeological materials at the time, Baro said, so many are still buried. Experts in the country estimate that only about 2% of the country’s archaeological remains have been recovered, Baro said.

Before leaving the country in 1989 with her mementos, Racette tried leaving them with a museum. But when museum officials weren’t interested, she took them with her. In doing so, Baro said, she helped preserve items that likely would have been lost.

“I think what she did was OK – even appreciated, actually – given the context back then,” he said.

Racette’s interest in returning the items to Mauritania this year coincided with a global conversation about the repatriation of artifacts, particularly from European and American museums with collections acquired from African regions under colonial rule.

In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron promised that returning African artifacts to their countries of origin would be a priority for his administration. Just last month, the U.S. government returned to the West African country of Mali more than 900 artifacts discovered in an illegal shipment.

Repatriation of cultural artifacts is enforced, in part, by U.S. and foreign laws, as well as formal agreements between countries, said Romano, who teaches a School of Art course called Art as Plunder: The Spoils of War, the Formation of Collections, and Trade in Stolen Art. In some cases, repatriation is driven by diplomacy and a moral sense of wanting to rectify the wrongs of the past, Romano said.

When U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents or other agencies suspect they’ve found an artifact that might have been brought illegally into the U.S., they call experts like Romano to identify it and verify its country or region of origin using photographs.

Although Mauritania and the U.S. have both ratified an international agreement that prohibits the illicit importing and exporting of cultural property, the two countries do not have a memorandum of understanding that regulates repatriation, Romano said.

Immediate Interest in Repatriation

Romano sent images of Racette’s artifacts to Steven L. Kuhn, a UArizona anthropologist who was working in Morocco at the time. Looking at the pictures, Kuhn estimated that some of the stone tools could date back to the Neolithic period, when humans were just learning to build settlements and grow crops, but it would be difficult to verify.

Romano also reached out to Baro, who has spent his career making connections in Mauritania and Northwest Africa.

Baro, who holds citizenship in both the U.S. and Mauritania, is chair of the UArizona Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, which conducts teaching, research and outreach throughout Arizona, the U.S. and abroad. He also has served as a consultant for international and nongovernmental organizations dedicated to providing aid around the world, including Oxfam International, the U.S. Agency for International Development and organizations within the United Nations.

“He has relationships beyond your average person from Mauritania or a professor from the U.S.,” said Diane Austin, director of the School of Anthropology. “He cultivates them; he’s a leader of a whole network in the African diaspora to keep people connected back to their countries to find ways to help. This has been a lifelong mission of his.”

When Baro saw Romano’s email about the artifacts, he picked up the phone and called Mamadou Kane, head of the National Museum of Mauritania.

“He was immediately interested and even excited, I would say, about the whole thing,” Baro said.

The two discussed handing the items off to the Mauritanian embassy in Washington, D.C. But Baro knew he would soon be returning to his home country, so he offered to deliver the artifacts to Mauritania himself.

Kane extended an invitation to come to Nouakchott, the country’s capital, for a repatriation ceremony that would coincide with an arts and culture festival on Dec. 10.

To get the items ready for their journey and the ceremony, Romano enlisted the help of one of her students, Adri Boudrieau, a senior studying art history, classics and anthropology, to catalog and photograph the artifacts.

As a volunteer at the Arizona State Museum and a former student-employee in the UArizona Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research, Boudrieau had experience handling and cataloging archaeological and other objects.

Boudrieau was charmed by Racette’s story and, like Romano, was impressed with Racette’s attention to detail. Boudrieau’s work involved measuring the objects and double-checking the details Racette had already recorded.

“It’s amazing how much someone who isn’t trained as a curator or isn’t an archaeologist still obviously loved and cared for these materials and saw the importance in them,” said Boudrieau, who aspires to have a career in museums.

After spending time with every piece of the collection, Boudrieau felt how significant the experience was.

“It symbolizes so much more – getting to connect with Mauritania and getting to be part of this repatriation, which normally for students is pretty hands-off,” she said. “It was nice to just be a part of it.”

‘What is Most Valuable’

Romano called Racette in mid-September to let her know that the repatriation to Mauritania would move forward.

“You’ve made my day,” Racette said.

Racette’s sense of urgency to find the items a new home turned out to be warranted. She died in Tucson on Oct. 19. She was 75.

Baro was sad to learn that Racette had passed before he could complete the repatriation.

“Here is a woman who spent a lot of time in Mauritania, enjoyed the country, loved the people, and helped in many ways, and then came back here and did this gesture,” Baro said. “I don’t know what the value of these items is, but to me what is most valuable is the fact that she kept these artifacts and thought about returning them to Mauritania.”

In Mauritania, a Focus on the Gesture

Baro’s trip to Nouakchott took two days and four flights.

The day after he arrived, he spent another 10 hours in a car, riding from Nouakchott to Ouadane, where the country was holding its Festival of Ancient Cities. The annual arts and culture festival, which finds a new host city in Mauritania each year, served as the venue for the repatriation ceremony on Dec. 10.

At the festival, Baro learned the artifacts would be on display at one of about 80 exhibition booths, with his situated right next to the booth run by the National Museum of Mauritania. He soon connected with Kane, the museum’s director. Dignitaries from Mauritania and abroad were expected to arrive as well.

But Baro was surprised when he eventually found himself face-to-face with Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, Mauritania’s president.

“The president spent lots of his limited time with us,” Baro said – about five minutes, even as his staff urged him to keep moving. “He was really impressed.”

The president, Baro said, wanted to know more about Racette and her dying wish to have the items returned. Similar questions also came from the French ambassador to Mauritania, who was curious to know more about the Frenchwoman who initiated the repatriation.

Cynthia Kierscht, the U.S. ambassador to Mauritania, who was also in attendance, thanked Baro for the work he and his colleagues did to have the items returned.

Many officials at the event concluded that this was the first official repatriation of artifacts to Mauritania. News of the effort has spread through the region, Baro said, and has gotten attention from media outlets such as Africanews.

Many people were most interested in Racette’s gesture, Baro’s willingness to see it through, and the potential for similar repatriations to follow.

“For them to get these items that are rare to find, it’s a big deal,” especially given the country’s history surrounding preservation, Baro said. “For a regular person to believe that this needed to come back home – to them, it’s huge.”

Kane, the national museum director, agreed.

“This symbolic return of artifacts from a citizen of Arizona is becoming a major marker in the history of repatriation of cultural objects to Mauritania and a linking bridge between the peoples of the United States and Mauritania,” Kane said.

Baro is focused now on using the repatriation as a starting point for a continuing partnership involving the University of Arizona, the Mauritanian government and the University of Nouakchott. Archaeologists and officials at the festival said the country’s most immediate need, when it comes to preserving its past, is a digital archival infrastructure. Baro is now investigating ways to help build one.

He sees benefits in such a project for everyone: Mauritanian schoolchildren living in rural areas wouldn’t always need to travel to museums in large cities to learn history if they could look at photos of artifacts. And college students and researchers in Mauritania and Arizona could use valuable data from such a digital archive for their research.

“The challenge now is taking it beyond this idea and coming up with some kind of action plan to do something that they think is important, that we think is important, and get funding for it. But the collaboration makes all this more reachable,” Baro said. “We could play an important role.”

Mauritanian officials, Baro added, also mentioned extending an invitation to a delegation of UArizona representatives for next year’s Festival of Ancient Cities.

“This successful repatriation effort by Dr. Baro and Dr. Romano and their colleagues across campus embodies the compassion, determination and integrity that we strive for at the University of Arizona,” said University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins. “I am proud to know that we have committed experts at this university who can take a request like the one Ms. Racette made and turn it into a reality. I look forward to seeing what comes of further partnerships with our friends and colleagues in Mauritania.”

When the festival wrapped up, Baro handed the artifacts off to staff with the National Museum of Mauritania. The collection, for now, is still in Ouadane. Some artifacts are now within a few miles from where Racette acquired them.

Soon, all of them will be at the museum in Nouakchott – the ideal outcome Racette had in mind when she picked up the phone in May.

Other UArizona personnel involved with the repatriation effort include Benjamin Fortna, director and professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies; Kristen B. Schmidt, registrar of the UArizona Museum of Art; and Abbass Braham, a former doctoral student in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies who is also from Mauritania.