“Excuse me,” the lady perched behind the desk calls out to Flicka and me as we cross the threshold. She’s like a bird dressed in red, her tone chipper. “We ask that you wear a mask on Fridays.” She points a wing at the box of face-coverings by the door.
“Why only on Fridays?” I whisper to my girl.
We oblige anyway, and Bird Lady is smiley, eager. “I love your purse,” she chirps.
“Thanks,” I say and gaze about the room. It’s my first time at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Flicka’s too. Only five others speckle the galleries, so I pretend the place is ours. We’re here for whatever the small museum offers, and we learn it’s Hazel Belvo’s “For Love” exhibition.
Assessing the Honey Locust series, Flicka and I choose which trees we favor of the nine. I say the third one on the second row—no, the first one on the third row; my girl has another opinion. But it’s only one tree, done in different palettes over time, blending the earthly with the otherworldly, so we’re always choosing the same one.
We wander through oil, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache, smelling rose trees and fireweeds and the same Giverny gardens Monet loved. The ladies—Les Maisonettes—enter the garden then, their dresses mimicking the flowers, and I can’t tell if life imitates art this time or the other way around because they’re art and life at once. And so are we.
Next comes the pencil work. There’s a series of twisting bodies in procreational contortions but done in such feathery light graphite, I can’t make squinty sense of it. In another frame, grief hits; the mother has lost her son. We move through her screams to an earlier series, also in graphite. Vibrations from car and subway rides in the 1970s guided the artist’s pencil into balls of scribbles from Loganton to Bloomfield, PA or Black River Falls to Madison or 50th Street, F Subway.
I bring my face as close to the drawings as I can and still maintain clarity. I stare at the squiggly lines, imagining landscapes rushing by outside the glass. Maybe a little backseat car sickness would’ve brought it an additional edge, but it’s so good like this. I move from one frame to the next. Where was Hazel going? Of course the places are listed, but where was she going?
Of all the art I’ve seen today, this is my favorite.
“This is brilliant,” I say to my girl. “Why didn’t I think of it for our Epic Family Roadtrip of 2019?” I still mark the long car ride like an italicized title in my brain. A pencil rendering of our travels would’ve made it even better.
“You can still do that, you know,” the girl says, “on another car ride.”
Oh, trust me. I will.
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