In Birmingham, Michigan, a northern suburb of Detroit, Wendy Halsted Beard ran a tiny gallery specializing in 19th- and 20th-century pictures. She’d taken the gallery above from her father, who opened it in 1969, working is effective by artists including Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and August Sander. This week, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) raided Beard’s nearby household and a Florida room she experienced been leasing.
Considering that 2017, Beard had defrauded her clients of more than 100 images worthy of a merged $1.6 million bucks.
The scheme was twofold: Beard hardly ever delivered purchasers their artwork, and she consigned photographs without having paying out her consigners or returning their works. And in some situations, Beard returned replicas to her shoppers alternatively of the originals.
Wendy Halstead Gallery’s storefront closed in 2020, and Beard moved the operation into her property and also leased a showroom in Florida. The gallery’s detailed mobile phone amount provides the caller to a default voicemail, and the website hyperlink on its Instagram page comes at an unclaimed area identify. Hyperallergic was unable to reach Beard.
In 2022, some of Beard’s victims identified as the Birmingham Law enforcement Office to complain that she experienced not returned their consigned will work. The division referred the case to the FBI, which recognized “potentially dozens of victims,” in accordance to the affidavit, which highlights many person cases. Several of the gallerist’s victims were elderly, and in addition to blatant ghosting, Beard invented lies about her wellbeing, together with a nonexistent lung transplant and a fictitious coma.

The affidavit outlines the story of Beard’s relationship with an 89-yr-old consigner residing with Alzheimer’s whose relative alerted authorities to potential theft. Among the other offenses, Beard returned to him a distinct — and unsigned — duplicate of a do the job he had consigned to the gallery, an Ansel Adams photograph titled “Tenaya Creek, Dogwood, Rain, Yosemite National Park, California” (c. 1948). The client’s original signed photograph was valued at $4,000 to $5,500, but the replica Beard returned to her shopper could be acquired from Yosemite’s Ansel Adams Gallery present store for $375.
In a single specially high-price circumstance, a consumer consigned an Ansel Adams photograph valued at $625,000 for a term of 9 months, via December 2019. It was a significant print of Ansel Adams’s “The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton Nationwide Park” (1942), a characteristically remarkable depiction of a Western landscape. Beard and her client agreed on a selling price of $685,000 with a 5% commission to the gallery. Though the agreement expired, the customer never ever obtained the perform back.
Data clearly show that Beard sold it for significantly much less, and did not inform her customer of the sale. In June 2020, a gallery in Jackson, Wyoming, formally bought “The Tetons and the Snake River” for $440,000.
Beard’s client was left in the dim and did not obtain a cent. He attempted to speak to her a number of times, and Beard eventually cited a extensive hospital continue to be, producing that she “got bumped up on the transplant record,” and despatched e-mail from nonexistent assistants claiming that she was receiving a double lung transplant.
In accordance to the FBI, Beard was hardly ever on the United Community for Organ Sharing’s record of donors or recipients.

In an additional scenario, a client ordered an Adams photograph titled “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” (1941) for $73,000. Beard deposited her checks, but never despatched the work. The customer requested why, and on September 1 of this 12 months, Beard replied that she experienced been in a “months-long coma.” But two weeks ahead of, the FBI, who was currently surveilling the gallerist, saw her depart her dwelling and push to a parking garage. She was “not physically impaired,” according to the affidavit.
The FBI suggests there are very likely more victims who have however to be interviewed. Beard was billed with mail and wire fraud, and some victims have achieved out to the FBI to consider to observe down their unsold works.