On August 6, 1956, Arnold Mesches had over 200 paintings stolen. When he returned to his Los Angeles art studio that day, the building’s glass front door was shattered. Someone had broken in. The paintings were gone, including a 30-painting set dedicated to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose trial and execution he had protested. He suspected it was the FBI.

In 2000, his suspicions were confirmed. Using a Freedom of Information Act request, Mesches obtained a box filled with his own 760-page FBI file, discovering that from 1945 to 1972, he’d been carefully watched. Throughout his life as an acclaimed painter and activist, the FBI had been keeping tabs on his personal life, places he lived and worked, book shops he visited, protests he attended, and more.

Hundreds of informants had passed through his life. Some were friends, lovers, neighbors. Others posed as local artists. One was a student hiding a camera in his tie. Sometimes it was “a comrade in a meeting, an asshole buddy you trusted with your heart and being, a confidant whose life torments were deeply intertwined with your own, the trusted friend who sat next to you at a funeral,” Mesches wrote in 2001.

Even with his FBI file in hand, the artist still had no information about the 200 missing works, but could draw his own conclusions: The pages covering three months before and after the break-in were missing entirely from the file. Hundreds of other bits were redacted, as well, mostly in thick black marker. The visual power of those redactions resonated with Mesches. He thought they were beautiful and decided to turn the files into artwork. Today, those works feel eerily prescient.

Fifteen years ago this month, in September 2002, Mesches (who died last year) opened “The FBI Files,” an exhibit of 40 collages and one painting, layering the pages of his own file with magazine clippings, illustrated texts, photographs, and paintings. The result, at the MoMA P.S. 1 arts space, was not just a portrait of his own lived experience, but a series of unconventional illustrations of a moment in American cultural history, a collection of pieces brimming with personal philosophy and critical thought. Where the words are not hidden by government redactions, they are elsewhere covered up by, or juxtaposed with, movie posters, celebrities, slick advertisements, images of Malcolm X, the KKK, and Playboy covers — all working together to tell multiple stories of violence, control, and power.