Story by Kelly McKewin
Photography by Laura Dudones
September 2018
The only thing I know as I sit down with Alex Zomchek on a bright Sunday in September is that I’d been promised by a member of the bee club that whatever we had to talk about was “not just some crazy conspiracy theory.”
Zomchek is in a sunny corner of Armstrong, already seated at a table next to Miami Ice. A medium-sized piece of poster board is leaning against the wall next to him, its front away from us. We exchange pleasantries as I pull up a seat at the table, but I waste little time diving into the reason I’m here. The page in my reporter’s notebook that would normally be filled with questions is empty. There’s only one question I came here to ask:
“So, what is this missing bee painting?”
****
Through prior conversations with Zomchek and other members of the bee club, I was already familiar with the story of Lorenzo Langstroth, a long-ago Oxford resident who is known as the “Father of Beekeeping” today.
Langstroth was a clergyman and beekeeper who lived during the mid-1800’s. Originally from Philadelphia, Langstroth moved to Ohio as an adult and spent 30 years living in Oxford. He was a passionate beekeeper who planted fields of wildflowers and imported thousands of Italian honeybees each year to keep his hives going. He is most remembered in modern times for his invention of the moveable frame beehive, a design still used by beekeepers around the world today.
Langstroth’s cottage still stands on Patterson Avenue, just to the side of Bachelor Hall. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. As part of the dedication ceremony, a Miami art professor named Crossan Hays Curry was commissioned to create a painting that would commemorate the event.
Curry, a beekeeper himself who had fostered an interest in Langstroth’s life, was delighted to take part in the celebration. He completed his oil painting—a portrait featuring Langstroth, his hive and his cottage—and asked that it hang in the cottage for a short time following the dedication of the building. However, Curry also made it clear that he wanted the painting back at some point: Langstroth’s life was one of Curry’s biggest passions, and he’d grown very attached to his oil painting. It could hang in Langstroth’s cottage, he had said, but it was not a gift to the university, and it was to be returned to him someday.
****
Unfortunately, the Langstroth portrait was never returned to Curry. Even towards the end of his life, Crossan did not forget his request.
“I had gotten a call from Lucy Curry about eight or nine years ago,” Zomchek says as we sit in Armstrong. “She had said that as (Crossan) comes in and out of his dementia, he keeps questioning what happened to this painting, because it’s one of the few passions he still remembers.”
The painting, Zomchek tells me, hung in the Langstroth cottage for years after it was commissioned, even as the building itself transitioned to hold different spaces—it stored university archives at one point, was storage space for the bookstore, held the offices for the international studies program and other Miami departments. Eventually, it was loaned to the Butler County Regional Transit Authority, and is currently being used as the BCRTA’s office space. No one is really quite sure when the painting went missing—we’d likely know where it is if we knew for certain when it disappeared—but it’s suspected that it happened sometime during one of the many changes that the Langstroth house underwent.
It was sometime in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s that it came to Lucy and Crossan’s attention that the painting was gone, and Lucy didn’t contact Zomchek about it until a few years after that. However, upon hearing the news of the disappearance, Zomchek immediately became interested in finding the painting. He had taken a photo of it years before and been enamored with the art ever since.
“I use this painting yearly in my lectures,” Zomchek says. “We also use it at state conventions simply for its historical significance. This is a painting that means a lot to the beekeeping community.”
Zomchek pulls out the poster board he’s brought along and places it on the table against the wall, looking at it proudly. It’s Curry’s painting—a portrait of Lorenzo Langstroth holding his movable hives, with a smaller portrait of his cottage in the bottom right corner. The painting is stunning, and unlike anything I’d expected to see. It’s colorful and abstract, with layers of blue and red and brown paint bringing the portrait to life and adding a certain complexity to it that makes me notice something new the longer that I stare at it. There’s an anatomical sketch of a bee on Langstroth’s shirt, and the words “Affectionately, LLL” float above his right shoulder, blended in with the layered and multi-colored background. Zomchek and I both stare at it for a few moments, and it’s clear immediately why this matters to the beekeeping community so much.
Despite his best intentions, Zomchek’s search has been on-and-off over the years. He tells me he’s spoken with the director of the art museum and the archivists at the library to no avail, and hasn’t been sure where to look since. Additionally, he says it’s easy to just forget to look for a painting in the middle of everyday life.
“There will be some interest and we’ll look for it, but it eventually falls off until inevitably Lucy sends me a Christmas card or something and I’m reminded that I dropped the ball on that,” Zomchek says. “It would really close an amazing chapter of their lives to get it back. This was one of the magnum opus’s of his life and I think he was truly disappointed when it disappeared.”
October 2018
Zomchek’s original idea was to have the bee club look for the missing painting, but like many well-intentioned plans, nothing really came of it. The “this-is-not-a-conspiracy-theory” text I received was a part of their efforts, but otherwise, there were many a meeting where it would be mentioned in passing, but nothing concrete ever happened.
I started attending bee club meetings regularly, hoping that a plan might collectively be made to find the painting. At the first meeting I went to, the president at the time, Riley, pointed me out in the back of the room.
“Hey everyone, this is Kelly, she’s going to be helping with the search for the Langstroth painting, if anyone wants to get involved with that,” Riley said.
At the end of the meeting, I approached him to ask if they had a plan already prepared.
“No, we don’t really have a plan yet, or anyone who’s been leading it. We’ve thought about it a lot though,” Riley said.
I attended more meetings throughout the rest of the semester, and it soon became clear that there wasn’t a dedicated task force of bee club members out looking for the painting on a regular basis. It was understandable why. Based on the way it was talked about, I think most people had a grandiose idea of what finding the painting would be like. The conversations made it sound like they expected to plan some kind of Indiana Jones-style break-in to the Miami library archives or an underground vault hidden under Armstrong, where the bee club would run around with flashlights looking at old artifacts until someone stumbled upon the painting in a corner.
The reality, of course, was far less exciting. The painting was more likely to have been placed in an old office, taken home when a professor retired or was sitting in an antique shop or basement somewhere—Zomchek liked to imagine it hanging unassumingly on a wall next to a portrait of dogs playing poker. Finding the painting would take a lot of talking, but not a lot of searching. As a result, I don’t think the bee club knew exactly where or how to start on a search for lost artwork. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure myself either.
February 2019
As Zomchek had told me on the first day, looking for a lost painting is not something you remember to do in your day-to-day life. My dedication to finding the painting dropped off for a few months. But despite all the unproductive meetings and uncertainty about it, I was still wildly curious and found myself thinking about the painting often. In February, I decided to take another shot at finding it myself.
On a chilly Wednesday afternoon, I set out for the Miami Art Museum to speak to Robert Wicks, the museum’s director.
Wicks’s office is right inside the entrance to the art museum, off to the side. I check in with the receptionist, but he comes outside to greet me before she has a chance to phone him.
“How are you today?” he asks as he ushers me into his office. I go to sit down in the chair directly in front of his desk, but he quickly pulls it back towards the front of the office and places it in front of the wall. “Sit here, you’ve got to see the paintings.”
Wicks pulls up a second chair next to me and points at the two pieces of art on his wall. He explains that they are both Crossan Curry works. One is a large linotype print, featuring the black silhouettes of birds taking flight. The other is a smaller painted piece of a man in a beekeeping hat, and I recognize the style immediately: the brush strokes and abstract style are reminiscent of the Langstroth painting. This one is equally as enrapturing, and I wish I could see the two paintings side by side. Wicks tells me that this painting is a self-portrait of Curry, and I study it even closer.
It’s incredibly similar to the painting of Langstroth, to the point where it looks like they could belong in a collection or series of works together. The similarities between Curry’s rendition of Langstroth and his representation of himself are so striking I can’t help but wonder what went through his head as he painted them both.
“Did you know him personally?” I ask.
“Oh yes,” Wicks replies. “He had already been teaching here for years when I came to Miami. I’ve been a big admirer of his work.”
I ask Wicks what he knows about the missing painting. Having arrived at Miami in the 1980’s, he wasn’t in Oxford for the Langstroth Cottage dedication or the painting’s unveiling, but he’s seen Zomchek’s photograph and has been aware of the disappearance for about a decade.
“Every year someone asks about it,” Wicks says. “I’ll get an email asking if it’s turned up yet or if I’ve heard of it.”
There have been flickers of hope over the years—a few times Wicks has received emails from people who have Curry prints or paintings to donate, but they never out to be the missing artwork.
“So have you been through the university archives or the storage areas where a lost painting like this might be?” I ask. “That seems to be the likely answer, that the painting was moved into storage when the Cottage was cleared out for the BCRTA.”
“We have been through the university archives and the university storage spaces multiple times,” Wicks replies. “It hasn’t been there any of the times we’ve looked.”
“Have you personally been down there? Is it possible that the people searching just haven’t known what to look for?” I ask.
“I have not personally been through the entire archives, but I know we have nothing like that there. I would know a Crossan Curry piece if I saw it,” Wicks says, gesturing at his wall. “We recently went through and logged all the artwork by giving it a number and putting a label on the back that it’s property of the Miami University Art Museum. We did it to every piece in the archives and in storage, so it would have been caught when we did that sweep if it was there.”
He also assures me there’s no way the painting could have been given away or destroyed, at least by the art museum.
“I’m the one contacted whenever a piece of art is going to be discarded. There’s no way we gave it away or loaned it out,” Wicks says.
However, the problem, Wicks tells me, is that he can only be assured of what the art museum has done. Miami has a number of informal art collections around campus, housed in different academic buildings and departments or collected by professors. While the art museum would love to catalog all of these works too, and include them in a list of pieces the university owns or houses, he says they currently don’t have the resources to do a thorough sweep of the whole university to look at every painting hanging in every building.
Unfortunately, this is also not the first or only painting to ever be lost. It’s a common occurrence for artwork to be misplaced in museums in general, and this isn’t the first painting to disappear at Miami either.
“A while back, there was a painting of President Pearson that used to hang in Pearson Hall that disappeared. We looked for it and it never turned up. In that case, we recommissioned the artist to do another painting, but that’s not exactly possible in this case,” Wicks says.
****
Missing, lost and stolen artwork is an enigma in the art world—if every missing painting in the world suddenly turned up, entire new museums could be built to house them. And though that’s unlikely to ever happen, there’s still enough stories about old paintings being recovered in unexpected ways to leave the imagination wondering about the possibility of stumbling upon one of these paintings yourself.
In 2005, a priceless Leonardo da Vinci painting turned up for the first time in 100 years when it went on sale in a Louisiana auction house. In 2016, a French family in Toulouse came across a long-lost Caravaggio painting in their attic when they went to have their roof fixed. In 2018, a Marc Chagall painting was found in the attic of a man associated with the Bulgarian mafia. There’s countless other stories out there similar to these—and every time one makes the news, the art world is stunned. How could this priceless painting have just been sitting in someone’s attic for decades? Are all lost works just under our noses?
Crossan Hays Curry may not have been a da Vinci or Caravaggio of his time, but he was well-regarded in Oxford and the southern Ohio area. And with his Langstroth painting likely still somewhere in Oxford, it’s clear how easy it is to get carried away thinking about the recovery of the painting, even if it isn’t in some Indiana Jones raid of the library. It’s all too easy to imagine a student employee in King stumbling across the piece in a closet somewhere, or a local Oxford resident having it in their living room, just waiting for the right person to see it and recognize it.
****
Wicks is thoroughly convinced that the painting either has to be in Oxford or that it was taken out of Oxford by a professor or student when they left the school. In any case, someone related to the town or to Miami is most likely to have it.
Wicks mentions a number of former colleagues and Oxford residents throughout our discussion, all of whom he believes might have a recollection of seeing the Langstroth portrait. He offers to call them at the end of our interview.
Behind his desk, Wicks pulls out an address book and looks up a few phone numbers. First on his list is Don Nelson, a former Miami employee who worked with student affairs and had an office in the Langstroth Cottage around the time the painting would have been hanging there.
He types the number into his phone, and from my seat across the desk, I can hear it ringing on the other end. A few more seconds go by and I hear the beep of a voicemail inbox.
“Hey Don, it’s Robert, I’m calling because I have someone here who’s asking about the Langstroth painting and I wanted to ask if you recall seeing it when you worked in the cottage,” Wicks says.
Wicks calls a second person, Hugh Morgan, a former professor who has a fascination with local artwork. This time, Morgan picks up the other end of the line.
“Have you ever had a recollection of seeing this painting?” Wicks asks. This time, I can’t hear anything on the other end of the line, but the answer must be a negative, because Wicks thanks him, chats for a few minutes about how they’ve both been, and then hangs up.
“He doesn’t remember it,” Wicks says. “Finding this painting is a lot of running into brick walls. We’re at the point where the people who were here at that time are gone or dead or just don’t remember anything.”
***
I quickly learn that Wicks is correct in his assessment—finding a missing painting is exactly like running into a brick wall, and there are a lot of brick walls in Oxford. I do eventually get in touch with Don Nelson, who tells me he hasn’t ever seen the painting, nor did he even know the Curry painting existed. He had always assumed people were talking about a separate painting of the Langstroth cottage he had once seen.
Robert Robbins, from the art department, had never met Curry or been familiar with the painting either, though he does put me in touch with a current Miami professor who took classes with Curry in the 1970’s. The library archives are similarly unhelpful—I am assured, just as Zomchek was, that there is no missing painting hanging out anywhere around the libraries or library collections on campus.
I even try Mike Smith, an Oxford councilman, who at one point had access to the Langstroth cottage, even after the BCRTA moved in. While I’m not exactly expecting the painting to be sitting on the wall where it was last seen in the 90’s, I still want to see the cottage—unfortunately, Smith no longer has access to the house.
I’m running out of places to look and people to speak with, and the painting is as elusive as ever.
March & April 2019
I did still have other avenues to explore when it came to learning more about Crossan’s life, who had fascinated me more and more since I saw the self-portrait that so resembled the Langstroth painting. I reached out to Ann Taulbee, a current professor in the art department, who once studied with Crossan when she herself was a student at Miami.
She didn’t know much about the painting, other than to say she was disturbed one of his works has been gone for so long, but Taulbee did have a solid sense for what Crossan was like as a professor.
“He was a very eclectic but very lively person,” Taulbee says. “He had this booming voice and he helped give all of his students a sense of freedom in their work.”
Crossan and Lucy lived on a farm outside of Oxford, supposedly with a menagerie of animals, including Crossan’s beloved bees. They had a pair of Afghan hounds as well as a number of goats, chickens, donkeys, mules and peacocks. Crossan would often bring the dogs and goats into his drawing and painting classes for his students to practice sketching, and occasionally brought his class to the rest of his animals at home—he didn’t want to offer his students a typical class, filled with still-life or professional figure-posed drawings, and instead tried to bring experiences to his students.
“He had a very faithful following. I only worked with him a couple semesters, but he had students that took him every semester. He had that kind of personality that was very gregarious and sort of cult-like. I don’t want to say that because that doesn’t sound good, but he had a true following of people who appreciated how he approached making work and living life,” Taulbee says.
Crossan’s work as a professor had a mythologically inspired atmosphere to it—as Taulbee describes him, he loved Greek myths and dancing and storytelling, and he tried to incorporate as much of this into his work as possible, whether literally (by often including words and letters in his paintings) or just thematically.
“He was a prolific artist and his life was all about surrounding himself with that world and animals and good food and flowers and trees. He had his own mythology in regards to who he was,” Taulbee says.
****
Crossan was an animal lover, through and through. As his numerous pets and farm animals attested to, he had a fascination and deep appreciation for nature and the wilderness. His love of beekeeping was the prime example of this, and certainly the root of his obsession with Langstroth, but his friends and colleagues were well aware of how much he enjoyed animals in general.
At one point in the late 1970’s, a stray chicken found its way into the garage at Lewis Place. It was a very sickly chicken, as it had been stuck in the garage throughout the winter and had gotten so cold at one point that its feet froze and broke off, leaving small frozen stubs in its place.
Philip Shriver, Miami’s president at the time, was trying to get the chicken removed from the garage and mentioned his dilemma to the provost. The provost joked that someone should see if Crossan Curry wanted the chicken. Though the suggestion wasn’t serious at first, it only took a few short discussions for Crossan to become the new owner of a no-legged chicken, which he promptly christened “Peggity.”
“Whenever you went over to the house, you had to deal with this peg-legged, no-legged chicken hopping around,” James Killy, a former colleague of Crossan’s, says. “They ended up with it for years and years. It was so typical of Crossan. He had all the animals no one knew what to do with.”
****
Of all the animals on his farm, however, it was bees that Crossan was the most passionate about. He cared deeply for the environment and began beekeeping as a way to help support the environment.
Crossan had always had a casual interest in getting to know the local history of whatever place he happened to be living in. When he first moved to Oxford to teach at Miami, he indulged this interest by researching Lorenzo Langstroth. His interest originally began due to his love of bees and ecology, but his fascination with Langstroth deepened the more that he learned about the man himself. As a preacher, Langstroth was known for his modesty and humbleness, and his invention of the modern beehive was never meant to be a commercial enterprise; he simply wanted to find a better way to support his many colonies of bees. Curry was attracted to the quiet nature of Langstroth’s passion, and took it upon himself to learn as much as possible about the original bee man of Oxford.
“(Curry) had fallen in love and lore with the entire Langstroth story,” Zomchek told me. “What he liked was that Langstroth did not do this for money or self-glorification. He did it for his passion and his zeal for beekeeping, and that spoke to Curry.”
Curry’s interest in Langstroth led to years of research into the man, during which Curry published a short book on Langstroth’s life and contributions to beekeeping. Through his research, Curry became the new “bee man” of Oxford, nearly a century after Langstroth’s time—this ultimately led to him being commissioned to paint the portrait of Langstroth for the dedication ceremony, a task he took on with great pride.
****
James Killy, a sculpture professor of 34 years, arrived at Miami in 1976, just a few months after Crossan painted the Langstroth portrait. He never did care much about the painting or Langstroth and has no clue what could have happened to it, but he did have a long professional relationship and friendship with Crossan himself.
“He was a prolific maker. He was always doing something in the arts. He really lived the part. He wasn’t just coming to school and teaching art; he lived it. That was one of the things I always respected about him,” Killy says.
Many of Curry’s students and other colleagues felt the same way about him—he was in his element when he was in his studio working on something, but he also had an uncanny way of tying his art to bigger issues he believed in. At one point in late 1997, when Oxford’s city council was preparing to tear down the water tower in Uptown park due to safety concerns, Curry created a series of wood prints advocating to keep the tower standing, which he distributed around town. Killy still owns six of them today.
Though his effort with the water tower was unsuccessful, Curry led similar efforts in other cases. Each time a significant Miami building was slated to be demolished or updated, he protested, often using his art as a medium for it. Because Curry enjoyed immersing himself in local history whenever possible, preserving or capturing that history through his art became an important theme in his work over the years.
“He was very much into the history of wherever he was. It’s why he did the Langstroth painting. He was also kind of an activist. Every time they’d tear down an old historic building, he was on the front lines to tell them they shouldn’t be tearing them down,” Killy says.
Despite his prolific output of art and the admiration of his students and colleagues in the art department, Curry was not interested in academics. He taught art because he liked art and he liked sharing in the process of making art with other people, but he had little interest in keeping up with conventions or the things usually expected of professors. Killy was always shocked he ended up as a professor in the first place—Crossan was completely against all details and practices related to academia.
“He didn’t give a shit about it,” Killy says. “It’s hard to say this in a way that makes sense, but I don’t think he ever fit into academia. He was a great colleague, he was a real artist, a guy who lived it, but he didn’t have the…I wouldn’t say aptitude, as he was incredibly intelligent, but he didn’t have the will to involve himself in the minutiae of academia. He spent his whole life as an assistant professor and he couldn’t care less.”
June to September 2019
Art was just as important in Crossan’s personal life as it was in his professional life. One of his five grandchildren, Emma Hildenbrand, remembers going over to Crossan and Lucy’s house once a week as a child. Crossan would usually be working on art when she arrived, though the nature of his work varied—sometimes it was painting, sometimes it was sculpture-making, sometimes he was simply using colored pencils or chalk to sketch.
Hildenbrand sometimes brought friends over to her grandparent’s house. She says they’d often comment on the art they saw there, wondering why there was a random sculpture of a dog or other creature just sitting in the house or yard.
She always had the same reply: “If you know my grandpa, that’s a masterpiece to him.”
Creating art out of ordinary, everyday subjects was Crossan’s style.
“He always created what was him. It was nothing that you’d ever seen before. The people that call themselves artists these days don’t always go natural. People might want to go and paint the same thing, but my grandpa would never paint the Eiffel Tower, he’d paint a truck on the side of the road because it spoke to him at the time. He didn’t fit the norm,” Hildenbrand said.
Despite the occasionally unconventional subjects of his artwork though, Hildenbrand thought Crossan always found a way to make the beauty shine through.
“My grandpa always pulled the beautiful parts out, whether it was an animal or a woman, he’d bring it to life,” Hildenbrand said.
Hildenbrand helped out at Crossan’s art shows up until she was 15-years-old. Growing up, she knew Crossan was famous around the Oxford area for his art, which she thought was cool. However, while she admired him for his art, at home, Crossan was still her grandpa.
As a child, Hildenbrand would go on weekly grocery shopping trips with Crossan, and help out on the Curry’s farm. On birthdays, Crossan would make homemade birthday cards with sketches on the front that described the age of the recipient or a memorable moment from the year—Hildenbrand remembers a memorable one from the year she turned 21, when Crossan drew her first car, which she had purchased that year. They shared meals together and talked often, especially during the few years in her late teens and early 20’s when Hildenbrand moved in with her grandparents. And after becoming a parent herself, Hildenbrand started bringing her young daughter to Crossan and Lucy’s home every Christmas Eve, where he would read “The Night Before Christmas” out loud.
****
Unfortunately, Crossan Hays Curry passed away at the age 94 on June 26, 2019. Though the missing Langstroth painting was not found and returned to him before his death, he left behind a vast collection of other art, and more importantly, a legacy in the minds of those who knew him.
“I just hope in years to come he’s remembered at Miami and in Oxford. A lot of people at the funeral called him ‘The Legend of Oxford’ and I hope that never fades. Twenty, thirty years down the road, I hope that’s still the image of him,” Hildenbrand said.
****
A year later, I occasionally wonder whether it’s worth continuing to look for the painting. It’s not easy to continue a search for something when you hit dead ends over and over, and have no leads, only speculations about what might have happened. And though the reality is unfortunate, it gets harder to find the painting with each year that goes by. As Robert Wicks told me, the more time that passes, the more likely it is that anyone with pertinent information will have died or forgotten about it.
And yet, I’m still not done with this quest. Fifty years ago, Crossan was obsessed with the lore surrounding Lorenzo Langstroth. Today, there’s a lore surrounding Crossan Curry, the twentieth century resident bee lover of Oxford, and I’ve been obsessed with it for months.
It’s impossible now to ask Crossan about any of this now, but if it were possible to speak with him, it would be interesting to know what parallels he saw between himself and Langstroth. His self-portrait and his painting of Langstroth are eerily similar. Looking at them, it’s impossible to miss that there’s some kind of connection between their stories, even if you didn’t know anything about Langstroth or Crossan.
In any case, while the mystery might always remain—we may never know what happened to the painting and we may never have the full story of Crossan’s life—the details we do have paint a portrait of the man himself.
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