If you're looking for excitement from Tim Schiffer - the Figge Art Museum executive director who started on August 1 - don't talk to him. Instead, just look at the walls.

In our interview on January 25, the soft-spoken Schiffer articulated a modest plan for the Figge, but one that visitors will be able to see for themselves in "clusters" of exhibits that play off each other.

Schiffer's predecessor, Sean O'Harrow - who left after three years at the Figge to head the University of Iowa Museum of Art in November 2010 - believed that the Figge needed to emphasize education above all else (including being an art museum) and that the endowment needed to be built from $5 million to somewhere between $20 million and $50 million.

Because the process of developing a strategic plan for the Figge is just getting underway, the new executive director didn't offer measurable goals in those areas. But Schiffer - who had been executive director of California's Museum of Ventura County since 1999 - has already put his stamp on the museum in a different way.

The first railroad bridge across the Mississippi (at Rock Island) and the establishment of industry in Moline are commemorated in two Quad Cities murals painted by William Gustafson. One can almost feel the wheel of progress beginning to turn in the depiction of these transformative events.

The Mighty Fine Line is a 55-by-45-foot mural on the south side of Steve's Old Time Tap in the Rock Island District, near the corner of Third Avenue and 17th Street. Painted in 2006, the mural marks the 150th anniversary of the completion of the first rail bridge to span the Mississippi River. Gustafson, who teaches art at Rock Island High School, worked with Curtis Roseman - a local historian and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California - to provide historic details of the mural's subjects. As Gustafson told me in an interview, historic accuracy in these works was important to him.

The Abstract Expressionist artist Perle Fine once said, "If I feel something will not stand up 40 years from now, I am not interested in doing that kind of thing."

Susan Knowles, who curated the career retrospective Tranquil Power: The Art of Perle Fine that closes October 23 at the Augustana College Art Museum, believes that the artist's output met that high standard.

The irony is that Fine, late in her life and until the past decade, was largely "forgotten," Knowles said in a recent phone interview.

Part of that is a function of Abstract Expressionism being distilled in the cultural memory to a few key figures. "Now it seems like all we know is Pollock and de Kooning," Knowles said.

But even though Fine was an active, exemplary, and important participant in the mid-20th Century movement, her notoriety diminished over time while many of her peers' didn't. She was interviewed, covered by the media, collected, and invited by Willem de Kooning to join the exclusive Artists' Club. Yet when the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978 organized a show about the "formative years" of Abstract Expressionism, for example, it omitted Fine.

I recently came across a photograph of downtown Davenport taken from the corner of Second and Harrison streets and facing north. The photo has a 1907 copyright date but appears to have been taken before 1892, when the Redstone Building was built. As I looked at the image carefully, I was struck by the realization that nothing in this photo - not one building or object - still exists.

I also saw a set of century-old photos of a roller coaster, merry-go-round, music pavilion, bowling alley, tunnel of love, and steep water ride - proclaimed as the largest amusement park west of Chicago - at the present-day location of the Black Hawk State Historic Site. It is so strange to see old photos that are identified as places we know well, yet little in them is familiar.

From one year to the next, the Quad Cities seem to change little. Over the course of decades, however, the differences are dramatic.

The same is true of public artworks. Many dozens of artworks have been painted over, removed, or relocated. Not surprisingly, aging materials account for the disappearance of many of these artworks; the cumulative effects of sunlight and temperature extremes take their toll on paint and materials such as wood.

The decision to move an artwork to another site, on the other hand, usually stems from remodeling or changes in ownership of the property where the artwork was originally situated.

The following are some of the best-known artworks in the Quad Cities that have been removed or relocated. Some were painted on walls; some stood prominently in front of buildings; and some lived in parks and cemeteries. Some were created by renowned artists, others by area students. What they have in common is that they are no longer at their original sites.