Hazel Belvo: For Love
November 4, 2023–May 24 2024
Nancy and John Lindahl Gallery
Hazel Belvo: For Love is a career retrospective that honors Belvo’s lifelong work and dedication as an artist through a focus on her deep relationships, her strong sense of place, and her feminist worldview. Belvo is a significant American artist, art educator, and feminist leader. From delicate drawings to monumental paintings, Belvo’s work honors intimate moments of love and connection, as well as nature and spirituality. Born in Ohio, Belvo worked in New York and on the east coast before coming to Minnesota, where she has now lived, taught, worked, and loved for many years.
This retrospective celebrates love and as an underlying force in Belvo’s artistic career of more than seventy years. By examining her work, audiences gain insight into the broader struggles of women artists as they build careers while caring for others, working for others, and endeavoring to make change in the world. Belvo’s artwork thrives because it is inextricably tied to her extraordinary, multidimensional life.
This exhibition brings together beautiful artwork from across the artist’s long career—from early abstractions made while living in New York in the 1960s to intimate sketches she drew of her son Briand the morning he was born. Belvo’s important Love Drawings, made while her son Joe struggled with a tragic illness, are a centerpiece.
About Hazel Belvo
Hazel Belvo has been an exhibiting painter for more than sixty years and has works in many private, public, and museum collections including the Steinway Collection, New York, the Bezalel Museum, Israel, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Weisman Art Museum, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art. She grew up in Southern Ohio, where she was always drawing.
Her bachelor and master’s degrees are from the University of Minnesota. After art school, she went to the New School for Social Research and was then a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Harvard for two years. She was a founding member of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, an important feminist art collective, from 1976 to 1986.
She taught at Quaker Schools and Rhode Island School of Design in Rhode Island, and had a studio practice in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She was a teacher and chair of fine arts at St. Paul Academy and Summit School, where she designed and developed the fine art program. In 1989, she became professor and chair of the Division of Fine Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she is now Professor Emerita. She shares her life and studios in Minneapolis and Grand Marais with artist and philosopher Marcia Casey Cushmore and teaches at the Grand Marais Art Colony. They share a rich life and have traveled widely with their studio in a backpack painting and exploring the world.
She is known for her fifty year exploration of a single tree, Manidoo-giizhikens—the 400-year-old cedar, known as the Spirit Tree—which stands on the Grand Portage Ojibwe Reservation on the shore of Lake Superior. Her most recent body of work, Spirit Tree: Honey Locust is a series of eighteen large-scale paintings, a forest, inspired by Overstory, a book by Richard Powers and is a tribute to a Honey Locust tree that was behind the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and cut down to build an extension to the museum. A selection of these paintings are included in Hazel Belvo: For Love.
Recently, Hazel Belvo: A Matriarch of Art, a monograph about her life and work, was written by Julie L’Enfant and published by Afton Press.
