Stolen Artwork Makes Multistate Trek Back To Elmhurst

Elmhurst artist Penelope Osio-Brown pours her emotions and life experiences into her artwork. Her mixed-media pieces are about thoughts and feelings, she said.

"They are an expression of what I'm going through or something that inspired me, so they're part of me," said Osio-Brown, who calls her artistic style "self-expressionist."

So when 13 of her works were stolen last September after an art show in Overland Park, Kan., she was devastated.

"As an artist, you always want your artwork to go to a good home, to someone who will value it," she said. "When that happened, I was crushed not knowing where they were going to end up."

But after about nine months of not knowing what happened to them—she even had put the incident out of her mind—she received a call from a company that auctions lost and stolen items.

PropertyRoom.com receives pieces from police stations all over the country, then authenticates or researches the property before auctioning it. When they contacted Osio-Brown, she confirmed the pieces were stolen directly from her.

On Thursday, P.J. Bellomo, CEO of propertyroom.com, reunited Osio-Brown with the artwork at her Elmhurst studio, 549 Spring Road.

"This is so exciting," she said, as she saw them again for the first time since the theft. "Other artist friends have had art stolen and never saw it again. I honestly thought I'd never see these again. To get them all back is really incredible."

"I'm so glad they went to the trouble of looking for me."

Bellomo said the pieces were found in a warehouse in Kansas City, Mo. Only once or twice a year does PropertyRoom get to reunite stolen goods with their owners.

"Goods end up in a property and evidence room of a police department, they adjudicate the (theft) case, then there is a waiting period for people to claim their property," Bellomo said. "Then they are ready to be released, become public goods and go up for public auction."

While not everything on the auction site is stolen, PropertyRoom partners with 2,500 police agencies in 48 states.

One of the stolen pieces from Osio-Brown's collection is fittingly titled "The Journey."

"Life is sometimes good, sometimes bad," she said. "They've gone through a journey."

While she is in business to sell her work—one of the stolen pieces was spoken for before it disappeared—she said she may have a hard time parting with these pieces now.

The stolen artwork represents about $15,000 and months of work, but it's not about the money, she said. It's about the joy involved in creating them—and the joy in getting them back.

"They're like my children," she said.