LOOTED ART: WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE THE “MONUMENTS MEN”?
DISCUSSION WITH MARY DALY AND DR. WESLEY FISHER
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY:
Mary Daly is a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State, following a distinguished foreign service career focused on European security issues. In her current work on Holocaust issues, she has the lead on looted art as well as on the U.S.-Germany Dialogue on Holocaust Issues and property restitution negotiations with countries including Croatia, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Luxembourg. Mary also served as Chief of Staff to the Afghan Relocation Effort and led the Foreign Service Association’s advocacy effort as they fought against personnel and budget cuts during a previous administration. Much of her foreign service career was spent in EUR, with highlights including working on the Irish peace process, serving as speech writer for Under Secretary Tom Pickering, and serving as Senate liaison to build support for NATO enlargement.
Dr. Wesley Fisher is Director of Research for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) and the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO). He heads the Claims Conference-WJRO Looted Art and Cultural Property Initiative, which works to encourage provenance research and claims processes worldwide. Previously a senior member of the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he was Deputy Director of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets in 1998. Dr. Fisher helped create what is now the 35-government International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), assisted the Government of Lithuania and the Council of Europe with the organization of the 2000 Vilnius International Forum on Holocaust-Era Looted Cultural Assets and assisted the Czech Government with the 2009 Holocaust-Era Assets Conference held in Prague.
From the 1970s to early 1990s, he was the administrator of all scholarly exchanges, joint research and conferences between the United States and the former Soviet Union in the humanities and social sciences, including relations between the archives and libraries of the two countries and in art history (during the Cold War there was a consortium of 132 U.S. universities and an artificial centralization of scholarship to match the centralized Soviet system). For many years he was also a professor at Columbia University. The son of the attorney for the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, Dr. Fisher is married and the father of two children.