Thirty-five years ago, two men disguised as policemen entered Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum claiming a response to a disturbance call. They would go on to bind two 20-something-year-old security guards with duct tape and tie them to a steam pipe in the museum’s basement for a pursuit that resulted in the art world’s largest heist, a 500 million dollar mystery that remains unsolved today, with no leads on where the art is stored, nor the identities of the perpetrators. thirteen total works were stolen, six of which were taken from the dutch room, where five empty frames remain. The Dutch room is seeing a multi-year renovation that includes restoration of these frames, the largest being Rembrandt's “Christ in the Storm on the sea of Galilee." 

In tandem with the anniversary of the robbery, director Eric Aronson releases Any Day Now, a fictional spin about the thieves and what exactly led up to the very early hours of March 18, 1990. The film’s campaign saw viral security camera footage claiming to be from the night of the robbery, showing different sets of suspects entering the building: policemen, meatheads, and then eventually Santa Claus, a TWO-HEADED man, aliens, an astronaut. The campaign culminated in an exhibition opening at Chelsea Walls Gallery in New York, which showed replicas of the 13 works of art stolen in the heist, where men wearing FBI jackets arrived to confiscate Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” in front of the attendees. 

Today, the museum offers a 10 million dollar reward and guaranteed confidentiality to anyone who submits information resulting in the return of the artworks, those of which are seen here in the final pages of the ‘Can’t Let Go’ issue. The Isabella Gardner Museum remains hopeful that one day the works will again live on the walls of which they were taken, a sentiment that reminds us that in all of life’s catch and release, some things are worth holding out for.