The curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced on 23 May 2011 that she was stepping down to take a job as the director of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New Y…
The curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced on 23 May 2011 that she was stepping down to take a job as the director of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. Karol Wight, an expert in Roman glass, has spent her entire professional career at the Getty, where she was instrumental in the reopening in 2006 of the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, California, where the museum“s antiquities collection is housed. Since 2007, Ms. Wight has run the museum“s antiquities department, succeeding Marion True, who left the job after being accused by the Italian government of trafficking in looted artifacts. The case against Ms. True, which dragged on for more than five years, ended in October 2010 after a court ruled that the statute of limitations on the crimes she was accused of had expired, and yet her legal team had not had the chance to call witnesses in her defense. The case put pressure on several American museums with extensive antiquities collections, and the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other institutions, reached agreements with the Italian government to return some disputed artifacts.