A former Detroit-area gallery owner has pleaded guilty to defrauding collectors of more than $1.5 million worth of art last week, charges that could land her up to 20 years in prison.
Wendy Halstead Beard has pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud, the Justice Department announced Thursday (July 13). Beard is the former owner of Wendy Halsted Gallery located in Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Beard admitted defrauding more than 10 victims over nearly three years, including one vulnerable victim due to his advanced age, officials said. Beard’s sentencing is scheduled for December.
From March 2019 to around October 2022, Beard defrauded her clients by selling photographic prints she received on consignment without notifying the owners and pocketed the profits, according to the DoJ. Beard used a variety of excuses to explain to clients why their work couldn’t be turned in, including telling them that she had recently woken up from a coma or received a double lung transplant. Other times, Beard said client photographs didn’t pique buyers’ interest, even in cases where the artwork had already sold. Beard also created fake email addresses for non-existent employees to support his fraud.
Among Beard’s alleged victims are Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist J. Ross Baughman, who recounted The New York Times earlier this year that the former gallerist scammed him out of 20 prints she appraised at $40,000.
“She was ready to take advantage of me,” Baughman said. the temperaturesaying that Beard “took my life’s work – all these very fun and sentimental personal artifacts”.
Beard is the daughter of the famous Detroit photography dealer Tom Halsted, who was a founding member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (Aipad) and was elected the group’s second president. Halsted died in 2018, and Baughman said the temperature he began working with Beard after first trying to contact his father after his death.
Another alleged victim was an 89-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease who gave Beard five photographs to sell, including a signed print by famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation complaint. When the man’s relatives demanded the works be returned, Beard instead gave them a reproduction that appeared to have been purchased from the Ansel Adams Gallery gift shop in Yosemite, Calif., the complaint states.
More and more alleged cases of art dealers defrauding collectors and artists have come to light in recent years. Manhattan’s top arts adviser Lisa Schiff has indicated in recent legal documents that she liquidate your business pay creditors after facing lawsuits claiming she defrauded collectors of millions of dollars. Palm Beach art dealer Daniel Elie Bouaziz was sentenced to more than two years in prison last month after pleading guilty to sell counterfeit works he attributed to top notch artists like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Roy Lichtenstein. Last year, art dealer Inigo Philbrick was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleaded guilty $86 million federal wire transfer charges related to collectors, investors and lenders fraud.
