The Tryon Branch of American Association of University Women will meet Monday, March 23, at 1:30 p.m. at the Tryon Presbyterian Fellowship Hall. The meeting is open to the public.  Refreshments will be served.

Guest speaker James Bond has an MBA from Georgia State and has successfully run two construction businesses. Looking for new challenges, he attended New York University in Manhattan and in 2010, he obtained a master’s degree in global affairs. It was during these studies, while he was taking a course about international crime, when a subject arose that captured his attention.

The class had to make presentations on some aspect of trans-national criminal activity and one of his classmates did hers on art crime. This timely topic, one with a whiff of global intrigue, spurred him to further studies. Bond discovered that ARCA, the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art, an internationally based database providing resources for tracking down stolen works of art, offered a 10-week course in southern Tuscany.

It was so fulfilling that Bond continued his education in art crime, going on to studies in Philadelphia and London. When Bond returned from the ARCA course, he began work on his dissertation for a master’s degree in art crime in cultural heritage protection, taking as his subject the protection of high valued art and collectibles in Western North Carolina.

While Bond currently divides his time between Asheville and Savannah, he still feels the pull of Tuscany, where some of the world’s best-known examples of our collective cultural heritage are just a few minutes or a few hours’ drive away. He is sharing his knowledge this spring in a three-week course offered by the Blue Ridge Center for Lifelong Learning. Some of the topics his presentation at AAUW will cover are the cases of contemporary art forgers and the theft from the Biltmore of books back in 1979.

AAUW (American Association of University Women) is a nationwide network of university women whose mission is to advance equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, philanthropy and research.

-submitted by Audrey Ortiz