The McIntosh Gallery is looking for a clue to unravel the mystery of a recovered banner stolen in the 1970s and recently returned to campus.
The colourful, linen banner was taken from an unknown campus location. And while the images are familiar, the original purpose remains in question. Prompted by a former student’s guilty conscience, the banner was returned decades after it was originally stolen with little information on its origin.
This pre-Second World War banner has found its way back to Western, after being stolen in the 1970s. Now McIntosh Gallery staff are trying to identify its proper home.
“A current mature student said a friend has asked if he could return the banner to its proper home and rightful owner,” says James Patten, director and chief curator at the McIntosh Gallery.
“We were hoping there might be some text on the bottom or a sport insignia of some kind to enable us to return it to its rightful owner, but there wasn’t. So the next step is to find out who it belongs to.”
Along with gallery staff, Western Archives staff and a few Visual Arts faculty and students in Professor Kathy Brush’s graduate seminar, “Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier” watched as the 7’x7′ banner was unveiled for the first time Monday at the McIntosh storage facility in the Faculty of Education Building.
While the design contains elements of what appears on the shield of the old university logo, there are unanswered questions. Patten hopes the campus community will supply some answers.
“A lot of work we do is like this, where you’re always trying to find more information about a particular piece to determine where it came from,” says Patten. “When you don’t have the total provenance – which is the history of an object; it’s ownership – you really have these holes, and you have to fill them in.”
Based on the banner’s material, it appears to have been made pre-Second World War. No decision has been made on the future of this new-found piece of Western history.
“We need to figure out where it came from first,” he says. “Ultimately, the best would be if someone says, “hey, I know that. It hung in this hall or that room’ and lets us know.”
If you have information on the banner’s history, send an e-mail to mcintoshgallery@uwo.ca.