Literature is inspiration behind newest library art exhibit

‘A Letter to an American Woman Who Wants to Learn French’ by Tiburon artist Julia Baker is among the works on display at the ‘Art Inspired by Literature’ exhibit at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library.

More than three dozen artists will display 50 works inspired by authors, novels and literary passages in “Art Inspired by Literature” at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library.

The exhibit runs May 15-July 10, with an artists’ reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on opening night. The reception includes a youth-focused event, “Turning Stories into Art,” with a supervised story time and crafts in the Children’s Room from 6 to 7 p.m.

Tiburon’s Julia Baker is exhibiting “A Letter to an American Woman Who Wants to Learn French,” a painting inspired by a magazine passage that echoed her French great-grandmother’s journey to America in the late 1800s.

When Baker’s mother was reorganizing the family home, she found a box filled with old letters, photos and all kinds of documents left by her ancestor. Baker is now using the old ephemera in her mixed-media work. These include a vintage envelope addressed to her grandmother, a faded photograph of her great-grandmother sitting on the lawn and the front of a letter the woman wrote in French, now barely visible.

“For me, this painting is a meditation on memory, migration and the way language both connects and obscures,” Baker says. “It’s a visual letter back through time, an imagined response to a real woman who already knew the language of the heart. I used the magazine page as an image transfer, so the title and article read backward — a visual echo of how stories shift overtime, especially across languages and generations.”

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