Ghosts

At the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, in 1989, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1991, paintings were out on temporary loan. I asked the curators, guards, and other staff members to describe and draw the works that once filled the empty spaces. I replaced the missing works with those memories. In 1990, paintings and objects were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. After the theft, the spaces that they occupied remained empty. I photographed these spaces and I asked the curators, guards, and other staff members to describe their recollection of the missing works. In 1994, the empty frames of some of these paintings were hung up back in place, emphasizing their absence. I asked the staff members and the visitors to tell me what they saw within these frames.