By F. Lennox Campello

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, right across the street from our house was the Our Lady of Loretto church, next to it a convent and a Catholic school, where it seemed to me that all the kids in the mostly Italian neighborhood in East New York attended. One of the things that I recall one of the nuns teaching us was a saying that went along the lines of “the most important thing to have access to is information.”

Or something along those lines anyway.

We are now in the age of information, where paradoxically, there’s so much information being pumped out that it is nearly impossible to keep up with it all.

For artists, information is one of the keys for developing, maintaining and improving your artistic career. Long gone are the days of the artist, secluded in his/her studio and creating away, waiting for discovery and eternal fame. If you, as an artist, do not make an effort – no a commitment – to stay informed… then you’ve significantly reduced your chances of exposing your artwork to the public, providing that this is one of your goals and you do not want to end up like Francis Hines and having your artwork “discovered” in a dumpster after you died and THEN becoming (in his case again) acclaimed and famous.

Enter Jared Whipple, a car mechanic from Waterbury, Connecticut, who in 2017 Whipple received a call from a contractor friend. The friend was clearing out an abandoned, collapsing barn in Watertown, Connecticut which had once belonged to an elderly man who had passed away. Whipple’s bud was essentially asking him for a help clearing out the joint and pointed Whipple toward a massive dumpster parked outside the barn.

Peering over the edge of the rusty container, Whipple did not see the usual debris. Instead, he saw hundreds of large canvases wrapped tightly in protective plastic, completely covered in decades of barn dust, mold, and dirt. Intrigued by the sheer volume of the discarded canvases, Whipple decided to load the mystery cargo into his truck rather than letting it head to the local landfill. He had no idea he was hauling away a multi-million-dollar fortune.

For years Whipple conducted a relentless research campaign for information: combing through obscure art registries, estate records, and local history archives. Finally, a faint signature on the back of a canvas cracked the case wide open: Francis Hines.

Hines had been one of the well-known artists of the 1980s New York City art circles — he was once a radical pioneer of the “wrapping” art movement. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hines was a known entity in the competitive Manhattan avant-garde scene. His grand artistic statement occurred in 1980, when he received permission to wrap the historic Washington Square Arch in New York City with 8,000 yards of white polyester fabric.

By the late 1980s, as it often happens in the brutal world of “what’s hot today” in art, Hines had faded from the spotlight. He retreated to his Connecticut barn, continuing to create his complex, wrapped pieces in total isolation. When he died in 2016 at the age of 96, his family and caretakers, unaware of the cultural significance of the storage barn’s contents, abandoned the property. The building fell into neglect, and its contents were eventually designated as trash, which is when Jared Whipple entered the picture (pun intended).

Whipple knew he held something extraordinary, but because he was a nobody in the rarified artmosphere (see what I did there?) of the fine arts world, he needed validation from the institutional cabal of the art world. He reached out to art historians and others and was usually ignored until he eventually caught the attention of Peter Hastings Falk, a renowned art dealer and appraiser. When Falk stepped into the mechanic’s garage, he was stunned. He instantly recognized the pieces as a cohesive, brilliant retrospective of a forgotten master.

Then and only then, after one of “theirs” had given the nod, art experts formally evaluated the collection of roughly 400 pieces, valuing the total haul at several million dollars. The narrative of the dumpster-diving mechanic and the forgotten artist quickly captured global media attention, turning Hines into a posthumous sensation in the age of Al Gore’s Internet.

May 2022, the prestigious Hollis Taggart Gallery in New York City officially legitimized the discovery. The gallery hosted a dedicated exhibition titled “Francis Hines: Unwrapping the Mystery” (get it? very cool take on the work title!). Art collectors who had ignored Hines for thirty years scrambled to secure a piece of the historic find. Individual canvases that were hours away from being crushed in a garbage truck sold for prices in the five digit range!

What is the lesson for artists in this bit of information that some of you have just learned?

More in next month’s column!

About the Author: F. Lennox Campello’s art news, information, gallery openings, commentary, criticism, happenings, opportunities, and everything associated with the global visual arts scene with a special focus on the Greater Washington, DC area has been a premier source for the art community for over 20 years. Since 2003, his blog has been the 11th highest ranked art blog on the planet with over SIX million visitors.