Family angry after artwork destroyed

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This article was published 25/08/2016 (2799 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg woman who used UPS to ship a $9,000 heirloom painting to Montreal last month is outraged after learning the artwork was thrown in the garbage.

Judith Putter said she paid a UPS outlet in Tuxedo to professionally package the painting for shipping on July 20, which ensured the glass was “masked” for safety in case it broke.

When her nephew Jeremy Shinewald told her almost a week later it had not arrived in Montreal, she checked the tracking information on the UPS website. It stated the package was “damaged in transit” and “all merchandise discarded.”

“I looked at it and saw the ‘discarded’, and I almost had a fit,” Putter said this week.

“I don’t believe it. It can’t have been discarded. It boggles the mind, what they did at UPS. How do you discard people’s belongings?”

Putter, a former gallery owner in the Exchange, said the painting belonged to her mother, Rochelle Putter, who died in 2015 and left it in her will to Shinewald, her grandson, as a wedding gift.

It was recently appraised at $9,000.

A collage in acrylic painted on heavy paper, it was an original creation called Bridge World: The Spirit Makers Come by the late Alicia Popoff, a renowned Saskatchewan artist whose work Putter had shown in solo exhibitions at the Thomas Gallery in 1989 and 1991.

She doesn’t have photos of the large painting — a metre wide, 11/2 metres long and 18 centimetres deep, weighing about 16 kilograms — but said family members are searching for photos in which it appears in the background.

Putter said she expects to receive the UPS maximum $2,500 in damage insurance, nowhere near the value of the work, but said it’s irrelevant in any case because the one-of-a-kind painting had tremendous emotional significance for Shinewald.

“My mother bought it in April of ’89, and it hung in her place for years, and Jeremy always loved it. She kept saying, ‘When you get married, that’s going to be your wedding present,’” Putter said. “I don’t understand what is happening at UPS. It makes absolutely no sense.”

Shinewald said he and his wife didn’t have space for the painting when his grandmother urged them to take it after their wedding five years ago.

“It’s a beautiful piece of art, and I love it… it’s something that was a beautiful reminder of a woman that I had an amazing relationship with. It was an artist that I appreciated, and my aunt had gotten me a smaller piece for my graduation, and this artist has passed on. So nothing can replace it. Nothing,” he said.

‘I looked at it and saw the ‘discarded’, and I almost had a fit… How do you discard people’s belongings?’– Judith Putter (above ), after she discovered UPS destroyed a valuable painting she had tried to ship from Winnipeg to Montreal. The painting seen behind Putter is similar but smaller than the one she shipped.

Shinewald said he and his aunt have contacted UPS customer service several times and been told various things — that it was stained or it was damaged or it was dangerous.

“We always work to ensure that our customers receive the service that they expect,” UPS said in an email to the Free Press, adding the company is working with the Tuxedo franchise and “the customer directly.”

Victor Avalos, who works at the Tuxedo location on Corydon Avenue, said the store is “very sympathetic” and employees have been trying to find out why the store wasn’t notified before the package was trashed in Lachine, Que., a Montreal borough.

“They say because the frame had glass and when the glass broke, it’s considered hazardous material and they had to discard it. But they didn’t give details on how it got damaged,” he said.

Shinewald said UPS sent him a copy of its right-of-disposal policy, which states it can dispose of anything that “may cause harm to any UPS employee, the public, or damage to other Packages, pallets, UPS equipment or facilities, without prior notification to the shipper.”

Shinewald said he filed a report Thursday with Montreal police.

ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca