Unclaimed: The Month My Art Titles Came From an Airport Lost and Found

There's a bulletin board at Terminal C of a regional airport I won't name, because I'm fairly sure what I did next violates the spirit of at least two policies. It's the lost and found board, and it is, without exaggeration, the best poetry repository in the United States.

Every unclaimed item gets an index card. Black roller suitcase, contents unknown, found near Gate B7. One child's red mitten, left on moving walkway, October. Bag of dental models, no identifying marks. Somebody at that airport is typing these descriptions with total sincerity, unaware they are writing found poetry that would get a warm reception at any open mic from Portland to Providence.

So naturally, I stole all of it.

The Rules of the Heist

Here's the experiment: for one month, no artwork left my studio without a title pulled directly from the lost and found log. I'd call the airport's lost and found line every few days (I became, briefly, a regular), jot down descriptions of items past their claim window, and assign them to whatever I was making. A muddy green abstract became Duffel Bag, Contents Unknown, Gate C2. A small portrait of a man I invented became Dentures, Gold Rim, Never Claimed.

And something strange happened. The titles did what my titles never do: they got out of the way.

See, I'm a chronic over-titler. I want the name to do the heavy lifting, to signal that I'm Smart, to pre-chew the meaning. But Umbrella, Navy, Broken at the Joint doesn't signal anything. It's just a fact. And a fact sitting next to a painting creates a gap, and the viewer falls into that gap and fills it with their own stuff. Suddenly people at my studio saw grief in a canvas that was, I promise, painted while listening to a true crime podcast.

Everything Lost in America Ends Up in a Bin

The deeper I got into this, the more the lost and found started to feel like a national archive of interrupted lives. Somebody's reading glasses from Tulsa. A wedding ring found in a rental car. A single crutch. An urn — an actual urn — logged in 2019 and never claimed, which I did not use as a title because even I have limits.

There's a weird history here worth noting: American airports have been running informal museums of abandonment since commercial flight took off. Lost item rooms used to be shoeboxes behind counters; now they're barcode-scanned warehouses with databases and disposal auctions. Every few years a news outlet rediscovers that unclaimed baggage gets sold in bulk in Scottsboro, Alabama, where a store has been reselling the contents of the lost since the 1970s. Your forgotten swimwear becomes somebody else's souvenir. America never throws away a story; it just marks it unclaimed and moves it to aisle four.

My titles were joining that lineage. One White Sneaker, Size 9, Platform hung above a painting of my neighbor's shed. It worked. I don't know why it worked. It just did, the way a stranger's grocery list is funnier and sadder than anything you'd write on purpose.

Then a Woman Showed Up Who Swore the Suitcase Was Hers

The month ended. I put the series in a small group show at a gallery space above a bike shop. On the second night, a woman in her sixties stood in front of Samsonite, Blue, One Wheel Missing, Terminal B for a long time.

Then she turned to me and said, "That's my suitcase."

She didn't mean the painting resembled a suitcase. She meant she'd lost a blue Samsonite with a busted wheel at that exact airport in 2021, flown to her sister's funeral with everything she owned in a grocery bag, and never got it back. She'd called. She'd filed. The bag was gone. And here it was, rendered in acrylic, titled with the exact phrasing from a log entry she'd never been allowed to see.

I did not paint her suitcase. I want to be clear. I painted a rectangle that a log entry made into a suitcase. But she cried a little, and I let her, and then she asked if it was for sale, and I said the only honest thing available to me: "It was never mine to sell. I took the photo. You take the frame."

She has it now. First artwork I've ever given away, and the only one I've never once regretted losing.

What the Bin Taught Me

Here's what I'd tell any artist stuck titling their work: borrow from the world's accidental archivists. The DMV clerk, the 911 dispatcher, the lost and found intern — these people describe reality without flinching, and their language has a strange, flat beauty no MFA can teach. Your job isn't to be poetic. Your job is to put a true, boring fact next to your image and let the audience do the aching.

Also: label your luggage. Seriously. Somebody in Terminal C is holding a bag with your whole life in it, and the only thing between you and a stranger's painting is a little paper tag.