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Cultural Property News
Cultural Property News covers national and international news affecting the art world, from in-depth research and reports on art and cultural policy to articles on museums, exhibits, the art market, media, education, technology, archeology, anthropology, and scientific discoveries. Cultural Property News is sponsored by the Committee for Cultural Policy (CCP), a US nonprofit organization established to strengthen the public dialogue on arts policy.
The Committee For Cultural Policy
The Committee for Cultural Policy supports public appreciation and the safeguarding of art of ancient and indigenous cultures through education. We provide resources and information to the press and educational institutions.
CCP advocates for a regulatory structure that fosters the lawful collection, exhibition, and global circulation of artworks. We encourage cultural policies that preserve artifacts and archaeological sites through adequate funding for site protection and policies enabling safe harbor in international museums for at-risk objects from countries in crisis. We defend uncensored academic research and urge funding for museum development in source countries. We believe art should be a positive conduit for international understanding.
The Committee for Cultural Policy was established in 2011 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The CCP board includes museum professionals, legal scholars, academics, art dealers and collectors.
Board of Directors of the Committee for Cultural Policy
Robert Poster, President of the Committee for Cultural Policy, is a collector of Asian art, particularly that produced in India or influenced by the traditions of the Indian Subcontinent. He is a past member of the Art Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and has donated objects from his family’s collection to the Brooklyn Museum, the Harvard Art Museums, the Princeton University Art Museum and other museums. He is a practicing attorney specializing in ship financing in New York City, and a graduate of Princeton University and the Harvard Law School.
William J. Hughes, Vice-President of the Committee for Cultural Policy, was President and General Counsel of Bicara, Ltd., a Los Angeles based, food industry group and remains on its Board of Directors. He received his undergraduate education at Stanford University, and his legal education at Hastings College of the Law and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been an active member of the California Bar since 1977 and is admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. He served the State of California as an Inheritance Tax and Probate Referee for Alameda County and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association International Law Section. Mr. Hughes has been actively involved in the arts throughout his career. From 1980-1983, he was a referral panel attorney for Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts. He serves as President of the Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association (ATADA). Mr. Hughes is a past Board Member and Chairperson of the Ethnic Arts Council of Los Angeles as well of the Society of Asian Art of Hawaii. He also formerly served as a member of the Board of Trustees and Vice President of the Southwest Museum (now a part of the Autry Museum of the American West).
Peter K. Tompa, Treasurer of the Committee for Cultural Policy, is a semi-retired attorney practicing in Washington, D.C. He is an authority on imports of cultural goods to the US. Mr. Tompa is also a well-known author on cultural property issues and has frequently contributed to academic publications and specialist magazines, as well as through his Internet blog, the Cultural Property Observer. He is a fellow of the American Numismatic Society and a board member of the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild, a life member of the American Numismatic Association, and a member of the Ancient Numismatic Society of Washington, D.C.
Kate Fitz Gibbon, Secretary of the Committee for Cultural Policy, is the Editor of Cultural Policy News, where she has authored hundreds of articles on art and the law. She serves as Executive Director of CCP. She is a long time member and Co-Chair for 2024-2025 of the American Bar Association Art & Cultural Heritage Law Steering Committee. She was appointed to the U.S. Cultural Property Advisory Committee to the President at the Department of State in 2000, where she served for three years. She was editor of and contributing author to Who Owns the Past? Cultural Property, Cultural Policy and the Law, Rutgers University Press, 2005. She is also the author of six books on Asian art, including IKAT, recipient of the Wittenborn Award for Best Art Book of 1996. Fitz Gibbon is owner of Fitz Gibbon Law, LLC in Santa Fe, NM.
Arthur Houghton is a former Foreign Service officer with assignments in the Middle East, the Department of State and on the National Security Council staff, Arthur Houghton holds a BA degree from Harvard University and MA degrees from Harvard and the American University of Beirut. From 1982 to 1986, he was associate curator and curator-in-charge of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum. He was president of the American Numismatic Society, 1995-2000. He served on the U.S. Cultural Property Advisory Committee from 1984 to 1987 as a representative for museums.
Michael de Havenon completed his Masters Thesis, “The Earliest Vishnu Sculpture from Southeast Asia,” at Columbia University in 2007. He was President of Kulen Capital until he retired in 1996. Prior to that, he served for five years as President of Merrill Lynch Capital Corporation and for approximately twenty years as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. He earned a B.A. from Yale College (1962) and a J.D. from Columbia University (1966). Michael is a member of the Board of Friends of Khmer Culture; the Board of the Walters Art Museum, where he is Chairman of its Collections Committee; and the Board of the Yale University Art Gallery, where he is on the Collections Committee. He was a Trustee of the Brooklyn Museum for 22 years, Chairman of its Collections Committee and a member of its its Executive Committee.
Matthew Polk co-founded Baltimore-based Polk Audio, Inc. in 1972, where he served as Chairman and head of product development until the sale of the company in 2006. After retirement he co-founded MSI DFAT Services, LLC a Baltimore-based company providing high intensity acoustic testing services for spacecraft. Mr. Polk and his wife Amy Gould, FAIA, are deeply involved in the arts as museum trustees, collectors of modern and historic textiles and advocates for policies that encourage public appreciation of diverse artistic traditions. They founded the Historic Textile Research Foundation, whose mission it is to develop a database of textile related carbon dating information for reference use.
Ariel Herrmann is an independent scholar based in New York. Her main area of concentration is Hellenistic and Roman sculpture and she has contributed to publications from several museums. After a ten-year residence in Rome, she served as a research associate in the Greek and Roman Departments of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and of the Metropolitan Museum. She has a long-standing interest in the history of collecting.
John Eskenazi is a dealer in oriental art, author and publisher, and a founding partner of The Art Newspaper. He was instrumental in setting up Asian Art Week in London and New York, and in establishing London Sculpture Week. He has curated or co-curated many specialist exhibitions at leading galleries including the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Eskenazi is the author of Il Tappeto Orientale, Milan, 1982, publisher of The Goddess from Anatolia, Milan, 1990, co-publisher: Dunhuang: Caves of the Singing Sands: Buddhist Art from the Silk Road, Textile Art Publications, London, 1996 and of Tibetan Elemental Divination Paintings: Illuminated manuscripts from The White Beryl, Sam Fogg Ltd. and John Eskenazi Ltd, London, 2001.
John Gilmore Ford and his wife, Berthe, are collectors of Indian, Nepalese and Tibetan art. Their collection was shown in the USA and internationally for many years and was later gifted to the Walters Art Museum. Mr. Ford has served as Trustee at The Walters since 1986 and founded the Friends of the Asian Collection there in 1983. He has served on the South Asian and Himalayan Acquisitions Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1980 and was a trustee of the Freer-Sackler Museum for ten years. For six years, Mr. Ford was chairman of the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust, a non-profit group dedicated to the survival of traditional architecture in Nepal. Mr. Ford founded the John Ford Associates design studio in Baltimore, MD. He is also a senior appraiser of the American Society of Appraisers.
James E. McAndrew is a Forensic Consultant at Grunfeld, Desiderio, Lebowitz, Silverman & Klestadt LLP. Prior to entering the private sector, James E. McAndrew spent 27 years working at the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), US Customs and Border Protection as a Senior Special Agent. He was the Customs and DHS subject matter expert in international art theft and international trade matters. Mr. McAndrew developed and implemented the DHS national investigations training program titled “Fighting Illicit Traffic in Cultural Property at US Ports of Entry.” As a Senior Special Agent, Mr. McAndrew has successfully conducted hundreds of civil and criminal investigations resulting in the conviction of many high profile cases and the recovery of millions of dollars worth of art and antiquities. Mr. McAndrew was an active member on the US Department of State’s Cultural Property Task Force, Interpol’s Cultural Property Task Force, and Interpol’s Iraqi Tracking Task Force. He represented DHS at international law enforcement conferences on cultural property protection, investigation, recovery and restitution.
Juan Javier Negri is an Argentine lawyer practicing in Buenos Aires. He holds a law degree from the University of Buenos Aires and a Master in Comparative Law degree from the University of Illinois College of Law. He is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Fundación Sur, an organization preserving the history and creative works of 20th. century South American writers and artists. In 2015 he received the Uría Meruéndano Art Law Award granted by the Uría Foundation (Madrid) for his book Banksy’s door: an essay on mistake and error in the purchase of artworks. In 2017 he was appointed to serve on the Board of Directors of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, an autonomous state agency to provide financial assistance to artists and arts projects. Since January 2012, he is included in the Geneva-based WIPO List of Neutrals for Art and Cultural Heritage. He is also a member of the Court of Arbitration for the Arts, The Hague and the president of the Argentine Association of Comparative Law. He writes extensively on art law and cultural matters.
Dr. Carlos A. Picón, an authority on Greek and Roman sculpture, retired after almost 30 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to become Director of Colnaghi’s New York gallery. Dr. Picón was elected Curator-in-Charge of the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1990. He most recently unveiled the new Hellenistic, Etruscan and Roman art galleries which were the culmination of a 15 year-long project including the opening of the prehistoric and early Greek art, the Archaic and Classical Greek and the Cypriot galleries. He was recently elected Curator Emeritus by the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Dr. Picón received a B.A. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Haverford College and Bryn Mawr College, and both a master’s and doctoral degrees in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford. Dr. Picón is a widely published authority on ancient and classical art. He was elected Trustee of the Corning Museum of Glass in 1995.