Jess Castellote
In June, when the International Council of Museums (ICOM) adopted its revised Code of Ethics, the headlines naturally went to the big, visible questions: restitution, decolonisation, and digital tech. But reading between the lines, what caught my eye was not the glamorous stuff. It was the everyday reality of lending and borrowing art. On paper, a loan seems straightforward: a collector or institution lends a work, the museum displays it for a period, and the work is eventually returned. In reality, loans are often where difficult decisions begin, even when the arrangement appears simple. At the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art (YSMA), we borrow regularly from collectors, from artists, and occasionally from other institutions. Almost every loan we have taken on carries an ethical question that never quite makes it into the loan agreement itself. The Code has plenty to say about lending and borrowing, but in the language of principle. Let me describe a few situations in which those principles become real decisions.
I start with the most ordinary case. A collector lends us a work, generously and without conditions attached. We are grateful, the work goes into an exhibition, and everyone is pleased, at least for a while. But a museum cannot keep any single work on permanent display indefinitely. Walls are finite, themes rotate, and most of what any museum holds, whether owned or borrowed, spends far more time in storage than on a wall. So, the lender’s piece eventually goes into the store for a long stretch, brought out only occasionally. The lender, understandably, is unhappy. They lent the work to be seen, not kept safely out of sight.
You can see it from both sides. The collector wants their piece seen, but the museum has to rotate what is on display on its walls. The problem usually begins much earlier: nobody spelled out, before the loan was agreed, what “showing the work” would really mean across a long period of time. A loan agreement that states plainly how often a piece is likely to be exhibited, for how long, and on what rotation, turns an unspoken assumption into something both sides have actually agreed on. It may not eliminate disappointment, but it does reduce the sense that expectations were never properly discussed.
A subtler version of the same problem shows up in how a borrowed work gets shown rather than whether it is shown at all. A work’s presence in a museum tends to raise its standing, and sometimes its market value, whether anyone intends that effect or not. A lender rarely says, in so many words, that they expect prominent placement, generous wall text, or a credit line as conspicuous as the artist’s own. But the assumption is often there anyway, even if nobody says so. Trying to satisfy those expectations can compromise curatorial independence. Ignoring them can strain relationships with lenders and make future loans harder to secure. The best safeguard is to evaluate each work on curatorial grounds rather than on who owns it: would we place this work here, credit it this way, if it had come from someone with no further interest in how it was received?
A related dilemma arrives less as a request and more as an offer. A collector proposes placing several works with us on long-term loan, sometimes years at a stretch, offered with the best intentions and potentially able to strengthen a young museum’s displays very quickly. It is incredibly hard to say no to that kind of generosity. But if we build a collection based only on what we are handed, rather than what we actively seek out, the museum loses its identity. We become a storage room for wealthy collectors, not a curated space. Most visitors will never distinguish between what YSMA owns outright and what is on long-term loan; a work’s presence on our walls reads as endorsement either way, regardless of the paperwork behind it. That means every unsolicited offer, however generous, deserves the same scrutiny we would give an acquisition: does this fit the museum’s collecting and exhibition priorities, or are we considering it mainly because it has been offered?
Imagine an exhibition that depends on borrowing several important works from a single collector. Like most Nigerian museums, we don’t have the resources to cover an exhibition’s costs internally, and we rely on sponsors. The collector lending the work is, by definition, someone with means and an evident stake in the show’s success. Is it appropriate to ask them to help fund the exhibition as well as lend to it?
A collector can reasonably support a museum through both loans and financial contributions. Plenty of serious patrons support institutions both with their objects and their money, and refusing that support purely because it comes from the same person would be an odd kind of caution. But timing is everything. If we turn around and ask a lender to fund the very show displaying her artworks, we cross a line. We are asking them to pay for an exhibition that will ultimately drive up the market value of their own collection. That fundamentally flips the dynamic. The ICOM Code of Ethics is unusually blunt on this point: it asks everyone who works in or with a museum to guard against any conflict of interest, real or perceived, and to disclose relationships that could compromise professional judgement or the institution’s reputation. It puts the collector in an awkward spot—saying ‘no’ to funding carries a social tax they never agreed to pay. For the museum, it creates a dangerous double-incentive to keep the patron happy, whether for the sake of the relationship or the cash flow. If we later want to change how a work is framed, or place their most valuable loan somewhere quieter because the exhibition’s argument calls for it, that becomes considerably harder once they have also become a financial supporter of the exhibition. The simplest check is whether we would make the same curatorial choices about that collector’s works if the funding offer disappeared tomorrow. If the honest answer is no, the conflict has already started shaping the show, and simply disclosing the relationship may not be enough to address the problem.
The same tensions appear in reverse when other institutions ask to borrow from us. A major international museum requests a piece that anchors part of our own display, with a strong proposal that would place the work, and by extension Nigerian art, within a prominent global conversation. The temptation to agree is understandable: it is pleasant to be asked, and there is a quiet pressure to remain visible within international networks rather than look as if we’re guarding the collection from the people who want to engage with it. But the work is doing real work at home too, anchoring our own story and our own teaching. Agreeing can mean removing something meaningful from our own audience for months. Declining can look uncooperative even when it’s the right call. There is also a second layer worth asking honestly: if we suspect the borrowing institution will present the work in a way that flattens its context or fits it into a narrative we wouldn’t choose ourselves, is the exposure still worth it? International visibility is valuable, but it should not come at the cost of losing control over how the work is understood.
A lender’s disappointment over storage, an unstated expectation about placement, an unsolicited offer that quietly reshapes a collection, a generous patron who is also a funder, a successful exhibition built on a funding pattern nobody designed on purpose, none of these situations involve misconduct. They arise because loans depend on expectations as much as on contracts, and expectations are rarely identical on both sides. The ethical challenge is not simply to document a loan properly, but to discuss openly what each party hopes the loan will achieve. Clear agreements cannot eliminate every disagreement, but they can prevent many avoidable misunderstandings.
What all these cases share is a gap between what a loan seems to promise and what a museum can honestly deliver — a gap that goodwill alone tends to fill differently on each side. Drafting a contract is the easy part. The real work is having the uncomfortable conversations upfront: laying out exactly what the museum can and cannot promise. Most collectors respect clear boundaries. What they will not forgive is being kept in the dark until it is too late.
• Castellote, PhD, is the Director, Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Pan-Atlantic University