A public installation of knitted artworks intended to draw visitors to downtown Conway, South Carolina has proved popular with local vandals, too. On Saturday night the yarn sculpture “Art the Monkey” (pictured) was lifted from its perch outside the Rivertown Bistro, only to reappear the next morning grimly hung by its neck on the restaurant’s door, Myrtle Beach’s Sun News reports. (more…)
Over Easter weekend thieves struck Italy’s National Etruscan Museum, housed in Rome’s 16th century Villa Giulia (pictured), launching a smoke bomb into the museum that distracted guards and blocked security cameras’ views while they infiltrated the institution’s second floor and smashed the display cabinets containing the Castellani collection of Etruscan jewelry and 19th century replicas thereof, La Republica reported, according to ARCAblog. (more…)
As part of its renewed campaign to recover the 13 priceless artworks stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, the FBI has been placing billboards along highways in the Philadelphia area — where they tracked the paintings to over a decade ago, and whose organized crimes groups they believe know more than they’re saying —like Route 93 (above) or alongside Route 30 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. “I think it’s really interesting they put those signs up in Lancaster County,” Demuth Museum director Anne Lampe told Lancaster Online. “I do think we have become such a society that moves around a lot, that they are probably spreading a wide net.” (more…)
A decade after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, the country’s national museum is still missing some 8,000 artifacts of an estimated 16,000 objects that were looted between April 10 and 12, 2013, the Art Newspaper reports. Though not every missing piece has been identified — an inventory of the National Museum of Iraq’s 200,000-piece collection, begun several years ago, progresses slowly — they include ancient cylinder seals and an ivory bas-relief of a lioness. (more…)
When the British charity Action for Children hatched the Scottish edition of its ongoing public art project the Big Egg Hunt by placing 100 artist-designed egg sculptures around Glasgow, it didn’t anticipate art thieves joining the hunt. And yet one of the fiberglass eggs, incubated by graphic designer Matthew Dent, titled “A Thousand Forests,” and said to be worth £10,000 ($15,100), was captured by uncharitable art thieves, BBC News reports. (more…)
Today, by way of marking the 23rd anniversary of the greatest unresolved museum heist ever — when two thieves disguised as Boston police officers gained entry to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with 13 artworks said to be worth a cumulative $500 million including a Rembrandt, a Vermeer, a Manet, and five Degas drawings — the FBI announced that it has figured out who is responsible for the blockbuster robbery, but can’t release their names or the organization they worked for, nor do they know where the artworks are now. (more…)
A seventh suspect has been detained in connection with last fall’s heist of seven artworks by Pablo Picasso, Meyer de Haan, Paul Gaugin, Lucian Freud, Henri Matisse, and Claude Monet that were from the Kunsthal Rotterdam, as a 46-year-old German man has been arrested for allegedly attempting to sell the works back to the Triton Foundation collection, which had loaned them to the Dutch institution. Ulrich Bremer, the head prosecutor in Cologne, told the AP that the suspect — whose name was not released — was arrested at his office last Wednesday. (more…)
Yet another arrest has been made in the ongoing Dutch-Romanian investigation to recover works by Pablo Picasso, Meyer de Haan, Paul Gaugin, Lucian Freud, Henri Matisse, and Claude Monet that were stolen from the Kunsthal Rotterdam last fall. Olga Dogaru, the mother of suspect Radu Dogaru — who was among the three suspects arrested in late January — is suspected of being an accomplice in the heist of the seven paintings, bringing the total number of people arrested in connection with the theft to six, AFP reports. (more…)
Last July 27 at approximately 1pm, the Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg, New Jersey, was relieved of 15 gold artifacts by two or more thieves who smashed through a ballistic plastic display case with a four-foot-long axe before making off in a getaway car with prized precious metal objects collectively worth about $750,000. Now the museum is offering a $25,000 for information leading to the gold’s return, the Asbury Park Press reports. (more…)
Egypt’s former Deputy Minister of Culture, Mohsen Shaalan, is also an artist, so when he was sentenced to serve a one-year prison term after being blamed for the lax security that facilitated the theft of the $55-million Vincent van Gogh painting “Poppy Flowers” from the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Dokki in 2010, the 62-year-old painter seized the opportunity to turn his cell into a studio. An exhibition of his prison oeuvre opened on February 16 at Cairo’s Gezira Center for Modern Art. (more…)
