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.
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.
In conjunction with Hazel Belvo: For Love the M is producing an artist portfolio of Belvo’s important Love Drawings series, along with a catalogue about the drawings with contributions from the artist, theater and performance critic Jennifer Cayer, and M Curator of Exhibitions Laura Wertheim Joseph.
The Love Drawings and the book about them are my life’s contribution to humanity. I think they are timeless and would like them to be seen by many, many people. My hope is that they will inspire education about physical and spiritual love and conversations that would not have occurred otherwise.
In 2024, I will be ninety, I sit here at my writing table and think about my Love Drawings. Most of my “love couples” are gone, and as I remember that time, I think about our world. Some people in our country are now about to take away our freedom of choice and control of our bodies. Wars are emerging and in process. Hate and division in ideologies are flourishing. Assassinations include many children. Many forms of violence and abuse have become normalized. We are still walking and praying for peace, and we are still working for equality. The world needs beauty even more.
I think the Love Drawings are even more relevant and will always be. I want, very much, that they are available, seen and preserved. If they are in private spaces (homes/collections) and in public spaces (museums) that could happen.
2023
COLLECTOR’S PORTFOLIO
$25,000 ($12,250 is tax deductible)
Twenty five archival pigment prints from the Love Drawings series and a signed book in a handcrafted box.
ENTHUSIAST’S PORTFOLIO
$5,000 ($2,250 is tax deductible)
Five archival pigment prints from the Love Drawings series and a signed book in a handcrafted box.
LOVE PRINT
$1,000 ($450 is tax deductible)
A single archival pigment print from the Love Drawings series and signed book.
Donations of any amount will be recognized in the book.
For more information about this opportunity to support Hazel Belvo: For Love, please reach out to Kate Tucker at ktucker@mmaa.org.
Minnesota Museum of American Art
350 Robert Street North
St. Paul, MN 55101
Located in the Historic Pioneer Endicott
651.797.2571
Minnesota Museum of American Art thrives because of people like you! Your contribution will support our dynamic and engaged partnerships and programs related to our St. Paul neighborhood, our Minnesota community, and our shared experiences.