Curator & Collector

Supposed Ming Dynasty stolen artwork image taken from the CBC I occasionally call myself a philistine when I mention that most modern art really doesn’t do much for me. I think a lot of five year olds can pull off what some contemporary artists do, and to me it doesn’t matter that the artists could [...]

Tomahawk restaurant with First Nations artworks; image originally posted by the CBC Twenty years ago, the Tomahawk Restaurant in North Vancouver suffered the theft of twenty artworks created by First Nations artists and acquired by the family that owned the restaurant. According to this CBC story, two days ago, a person came into the restaurant [...]

The two photographs in this post show some of the recovered gold Bill Reid artefacts in the Museum of Anthropology’s collection; I photographed them on the first day of the re-opened Bill Reid Rotunda. (For those interested, this post links to the last in a series I did on the subject of this particular heist [...]

Image of recently recovered Bill Reid brooch taken from the CBC I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, but I did want to conclude the saga of the stolen Bill Reid artworks. The CBC is reporting that the last two artworks stolen from the UBC Museum of Anthropology were recovered. Also, a career criminal [...]

A possibly authentic “Dali” found in Estepona, Spain. Image from the Associated Press An Associated Press story released from Estepona, Spain, has it that dozens of fake Dali artworks have been seized by police. The culprit, a Frenchman, has been found and charged with fraud and forgery. This discovery comes ten years after police in [...]

Image of recovered Bill Reid artwork from the CBC I just discovered that I missed an important story last month: the last two Bill Reid artworks that were stolen from the Museum of Anthropology some months ago have been found. Notwithstanding the damage to one of the pieces (an argelite carving), it’s wonderful that all [...]

Image of stolen Bill Reid gold artwork taken from the CBC UPDATE: All but two of the stolen Bill Reid pieces have been found. CBC and other media outlets are reporting that some of the stolen Bill Reid artefacts have just been recovered from the Vancouver suburb of Burnbaby. Police aren’t saying just yet which [...]

CBC Image of stolen Bill Reid gold artwork UPDATED (Original post below): CBC has learned disturbing details about the art heist of the Bill Reid artworks at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Chiefest among them: -several cameras mysteriously “went offline” four hours before the incident -when the cameras went offline, an alarm was tripped, but nothing [...]

We’ve got more museum stories today than one can shake a stick at. On the donations front, we have Leonard A. Lauder’s American Contemporary Art Foundation donating $131 million to the Whitney Museum of American Art. $125 million of this will go towards endowment funds, which the New York Times notes are more difficult to [...]

Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Image from Crimelibrary.com Another donation to report today. From a press release at Earth Times: Duke Energy Foundation is giving $1 million for development of the Museum of Life and the Environment on the Catawba River at I-77 in York County [South Carolina]. In other news, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” is [...]