DAM removes name from gallery, returns $185K
In January 2018, Emma C. Bunker and the Denver Art Museum reached an agreement — one that would etch the longtime donor and board member’s name on the institution’s walls for half a century to come.
The esteemed scholar, who helped the Denver museum build its Asian art collection over six decades, would donate $125,000 to the museum’s Vision 2021 Capital Campaign, a project to renovate the north building and expand the museum campus. Two of her children would chip in another $60,000 combined.
In return, the Denver Art Museum agreed to put the Bunker name in three-dimensional lettering on a gallery wall, displayed in a prominent location until 2071.
But five years to the day after Bunker put pen to paper on a deal that would cement her legacy in the Mile High City for decades to come, the museum notified the Colorado attorney general that it planned to remove her name from the wall in the Martin Building and give back all the money.
The museum’s attorney, in a Jan. 25 letter obtained this week by The Denver Post, wrote that the institution could no longer abide by the naming agreement due to mounting evidence that its respected donor — who died in 2021 — aided a criminal enterprise.
The letter was sent nearly two months after the publication of a yearlong investigation by The Post that found Bunker helped her close friend and collaborator, Douglas Latchford, sell and loan looted Cambodian relics across the globe.
“In light of Bunker’s long involvement with Latchford, connection to pieces with false provenance, documents indicating that she intentionally provided false provenance, and related issues, the museum has determined that it is no longer willing to abide by the (naming agreement),” the museum’s lawyer, Heidi S. Glance, wrote in the letter.
Now, the Bunker name has come down, Denver Art Museum officials confirmed Thursday. The six-figure donation was returned to her estate and children.
“This action, approved by the museum’s Board of Trustees, follows evidence that former museum trustee and volunteer, Emma Bunker, participated with indicted art dealer Douglas Latchford to mislead the museum into acquiring looted and illegally trafficked works of art,” the museum said in a statement released Thursday.
Along with the naming agreement, Bunker also donated nine artworks to her beloved museum, pieces she promised had “not been imported or exported into or from any country contrary to its laws.” At least six of those works are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. The museum wants to give back the rest, either to their countries of origin or to the Bunker family.
All told, the removal of Bunker’s name and monetary return represents the most significant action taken by the Denver Art Museum since The Post’s investigation outlined the scholar’s integral role in an international art looting scandal.
“We hope this marks a turning point for the Denver Art Museum,” Bradley J. Gordon, a lawyer spearheading Cambodia’s global quest to reclaim its heritage, said Wednesday. “It starts to recognize the terrible harm Emma Bunker and Douglas Latchford did to an entire nation.”
Three of Bunker’s children did not respond to requests for comment or declined to speak to a reporter Wednesday.
A scholar’s role examined
The Post’s series found Bunker was hardly a passive player in Latchford’s scheme to sell stolen Cambodian relics for huge profits.
The Bangkok-based collector and dealer over the years accumulated one of the world’s largest private collections of Khmer antiquities — many of which, authorities say, were plundered during Cambodia’s bloody civil war by bands of Khmer Rouge soldiers. Latchford, meanwhile, sold these thousand-yearold artifacts to wealthy foreign collectors and prominent museums such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
And he couldn’t have done it without his trusted confidant in Denver, The Post’s reporting found.
Emails taken from Latchford’s computer — and shared with The Post — show Bunker overtly discussing how to forge signatures on documents needed to transport looted works. She co-authored three books on Khmer art that experts say were necessary for Latchford to legitimize and move his plundered pieces around the globe, and she repeatedly vouched for falsified provenances — antiquities’ ownership history.
Bunker’s association with the Denver Art Museum also allowed Latchford to use the Mile High City museum as a way station for these priceless Southeast Asian relics — serving to sanitize them for sale to future buyers, The Post found. Latchford sold, loaned and gifted 14 pieces to the museum, deals that Bunker shepherded along. Only the Met had more Latchford pieces in its collection than Denver.
The Colorado scholar, who died at age 90, is named or referenced in five civil and criminal cases related to trafficking stolen art, though she never was charged with a crime. A federal grand jury in New York indicted Latchford in 2019, accusing him of pilfering Cambodia’s cultural heritage.
He died in 2020 before he could stand trial.
The Denver Art Museum, through last year, defended its association with Bunker and her decades of financial and scholarly contributions, despite growing evidence that she collaborated in Latchford’s illicit dealings.
Chasing Aphrodite, a blog covering the movement of stolen antiquities, detailed Bunker’s questionable involvement with several pieces at Denver’s museum in 2012. The New York Times identified Bunker in 2017 as a “co-conspirator” in a scheme to doctor provenances — or ownership histories — to allow stolen Cambodia antiquities to be sold on the open market.
Public court documents referencing Bunker’s role in Latchford’s operation were available a decade ago, repeatedly mentioning a “Colorado scholar.”
Only now is the museum reckoning with Bunker’s past.