How do you make art to commemorate a historic work that has disappeared?

In 1876, Edward Mitchell Bannister became the first known Black artist to win a national award, for his landscape painting “Under the Oaks.” It was purchased and has since gone missing, with no photographic evidence of it. It is possibly his greatest work, and has now become his greatest mystery.

My carved linocut print depicts the back of an old framed canvas, signed “E.M. Bannister 76.” It will be exhibited at Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery this fall.