10/14/2026
The Trafficker Who Furnished the Museums of LA | Hyperallergic
A team of researchers excavates the story of Earl Stendahl, a mid-century gallerist who shamelessly stole ancient Mesoamerican objects and marketed them to the institutional art world.
by Armando Pulido
In a 1940 photograph by Man Ray, Academy Award-winning actor Teresa Wright poses misty-eyed alongside an ancient Chacmool sculpture. The reclining figure, with its head contorted toward viewers, offered a refreshed vision of modernity to both Hollywood stars and a growing clientele of collectors and museums interested in pre-colonial art from ancient Mesoamerica. In 1947, for instance, the Minneapolis Institute of Art purchased a “King Chak Mool” for $10,000. That sculpture toured Europe as part of an exhibition from 1958 to 1960 and quickly became a cornerstone of the museum’s collection. Just a decade later, one specialist made a dreaded discovery: The sculpture was a forgery.
This story, and that of the gallerist at its center, is chronicled in Artifacts to Art: Collecting Ancient America in Midcentury L.A. (2026) by Andrew D. Turner, Mary E. Miller, and Khristaan D. Villela. The book elaborates on the various conditions that shifted the classification of “pre-Hispanic” artifacts from anthropological items of study to art objects that could be collected by museums and patrons alike. It also helped answer a question I’ve always had about Los Angeles museums as a curator myself: Why is so much cultural heritage of ancient Central and South America preserved in our city’s collections?
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image from April Dammann’s "Ex*********st: Earl Stendahl, Art Dealer as Impresario (2011)"
