great and mighty things

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is running an outsider art exhibit, Great and Mighty Things, through June 9th.  It includes 200 pieces collected over the last 30 years by long-time Philadelphians Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz.  The show's title comes from one of several selections by the late artist Reverend Howard Finster who combined religious text and imagery (in this case, from Jeremiah 33:3, "Come with me and I will show you great and mighty things").  More here in a review by Sarah Burford with Title Magazine.  Below, a tour by Curator Ann Percy and Curatorial Assistant Cara Zimmerman.

somewhere in philly

Via boing boing, an epic infographic from Hilly "chatgirl" Sargeant on the 1990 500 million dollar Gardner Museum Heist.  (Go to the PDF version to read the fine print.)

In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, while virtually every other Bostonian lay drunk in gutters or passed out in their beds, two men dressed as Boston Police officers conned their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by telling guards they were responding to some kind of disturbance.  The men spent a total of 81 minutes inside the museum, and made off with thirteen (13) works of art currently valued at over $500 million.  In 2013, on the 23rd anniversary of the heist, the FBI announced that they knew who committed the crime.  But they won't name names.  And the whereabouts of the artwork remains a mystery.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the FBI now believes some of the pieces, somewhere in Philly.  The mysterious heist is considered the largest property crime in U.S. history.  See the thirteen works of art here at Time NewsFeed.

More on lost (as well as stolen) art here, via the Tate's intriguing online exhibition, The Gallery Of Lost Art.


*Photo credit/Time NewsFeed/FBI photograph/"Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait," (1634), one of the 13 works of art from the mysterious 1990 Gardner heist.