While Guilford’s art collection may never be comparable to that of the Louvre or the Met, that does not seem to have kept art bandits away. In the last three weeks, two paintings have gone missing from the CCE building at Hendricks Hall, with little to no information pointing to the culprit. The paintings are original works by David Serotkin, the son of the dean for continuing education, Rita Serotkin. Part of a series of personal portraits depicting current CCE students, the paintings are valued at $500 a piece.

“We don’t know who to suspect,” said Mary Bubar, Hendricks Hall office manager. “We’ve notified the police, but I wouldn’t expect them to be very far in their investigation.”

Bubar also claimed that no one noticed the paintings’ disappearance until the son of a CCE student pointed out that the work entitled “Wallace and Marian,” featuring him and his mother, was no longer on the wall.

“It was rather touching,” Bubar said. “The little boy pointed up to the empty space and said, ‘Mom, where’s our picture?'”

The other painting “Chris,” a portrait of CCE student Chris Corrigan, was noticed missing shortly thereafter. Since then, all of the pieces have been taken off the wall and replaced with prints for security reasons.

“Who steals a picture of a CCE student?” said sophomore sociology major Matt Gibson-Hatcher after hearing of the theft. “That’s a pretty crooked thing to do.”

This has been the second incident of art theft at Guilford this year. Last August, two pieces were stolen from the Hege Library collection – a drawing by Yves Tanguy and a lithograph by Joan Miro. Evidently the thieves were fans of the surrealist movement.

Unwilling to quote the respective values of the two pieces for purposes of confidentiality, Terry Hammond, curator and director of the Guilford College Art Gallery, simply said that they were “definitely up there.”

Given the drastic difference between the style and the value of Serotkin’s work versus that of the two renowned surrealists, it seems unlikely that the two thefts are related.

“We really haven’t the vaguest idea who could have done this in either case,” Hammond said. “We at the gallery also notified the police – and now we have our two missing pieces on the FBI’s stolen art list. Of course we still know nothing.