Photo: Mike Macklin/WBZ NewsRadio
BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — Officials with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are staying hopeful that the stolen artworks in the largest art heist in history will be recovered.
Wednesday marked 36 years since 13 art pieces were swiped from the museum’s collections in 1990. Several empty frames are still hung up inside the exhibit rooms as a reminder of the crime.
A major renovation project to restore the Dutch Room, where six of the stolen paintings were originally framed, began in 2024. The museum hopes to complete the project in early 2027.
“Without those pieces in this space, we don’t have a sense of what Gardner really wanted us to see,” Holly Salmon, the museum’s director of conservation, said.
Salmon said recovering the artworks is still a principal goal, despite a decades-long, seemingly futile FBI investigation into the heist.
“All I care about is somebody being in touch with me and telling me where I should go to get them and putting them back where they belong,” Anthony Amore, the Gardner’s security director, said.
Amore believes the pieces are still somewhere in the country, possibly all together and close by.
“Paintings stolen in the United States stay in the United States,” he said.
If, or when, those missing works do return to the museum, Salmon said they will be ready.
“We do anticipate that moment when those works come back, so we are restoring this whole gallery in anticipation of that moment,” she said.
WBZ NewsRadio’s Mike Macklin reports.