A bronze mask of Joni Mitchell is missing, and a friend of the music icon hopes it can be returned.

"It's a cultural artifact," Don Freed said recently.

The mask was made from a plaster mould of Mitchell's face in 1985 during the recording session for the fundraising song Tears Are Not Enough.

Mitchell gave it to Freed 10 years later on a visit to her home in Los Angeles. They were dating at the time.

"I had it hanging on my wall in Prince Albert for a couple of years," Freed said.

When he moved, Freed put the mask in bubble wrap and stored it in a shoe box at his mother's house in Saskatoon.

There it remained until 2005.

Freed, a musician originally from Saskatoon and now married with a young daughter and living in Winnipeg, was in Saskatoon last June doing a show at a downtown bar. Mitchell was also in town and came to the show. Freed remembered the mask and dropped it off at the front desk of the Delta Bessborough Hotel for her the next morning with a note in an envelope on the lid of the box. He didn't deliver it in person because he didn't want to wake Mitchell. Freed assumed she'd received the mask. It was only a year later that he talked to her again and learned she never did.

"That was the last I ever saw of it," said Freed, who's contacted the hotel and the city police.

"Maybe somebody who has it doesn't even know what it is." No one working that day remembers the box, said Andrew Turnbull, general manager of the Bessborough.

Normally, a package left for a guest is delivered immediately unless there's a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.

"I'm not trying to absolve ourselves from responsibility but we have no knowledge that we ever received it," said Turnbull. "I don't believe we have it." Mitchell declined to comment on the matter herself but Freed said she wasn't distressed about the missing mask.

"I think I'm more upset about it." It is, however, something Mitchell would like to see on display at the Mendel Art Gallery, Freed said.

The gallery has plans for a Mitchell-themed cafe in its upcoming renovation.

"In the future, it's going to be like having the face of Mozart. "I think that thing should belong in a place of honour." Mendel director Terry Graff said a Mitchell mask might be a suitable item to display.

"It's possible. We'd obviously have to see it to see how it might connect." The Mendel already has a plaster cast of her hands, taken last year when she was in town for the Lieutenant Governor's Centennial Gala.

Since it's a mask taken from a mould rather than an artist's interpretation of the subject, Graff doesn't consider the mask a work of art in itself.

"I think largely the value would be the attachment to celebrity, the fact it is Joni Mitchell," said Graff.

"It raises a question of Joni Mitchell artifacts and where they should be held and Saskatoon becoming a repository or a centre of some kind for the care and preservation of this material," said Graff.

Freed hopes it's merely an oversight "because to think otherwise is really creepy." He'd hate to see someone profi t by selling the mask in an online auction, for instance.

Saskatoon Police Staff Sgt. Kirby Harmon said the investigation is just getting underway. It's a routine case, Harmon said, apart from the celebrity aspect.

"From my point of view that's the unusual part of it, is what got taken." Anyone with information is asked to contact city police.