Julie L'Enfant

Sometimes, looking back at one's life, one can recall the precise end of childhood. For Meredith, that time is 1955, when she is fourteen years old and her quiet, predictable life revolving around high school and ballet classes is upended by a visit from a famous choreographer. In Middleton, a medium-sized city in north Louisiana, his great world of professional ballet is viewed as remote, exotic and not quite respectable. Beautifully capturing a long-ago time and place where mothers were not supposed to work and propriety ruled, "The Dancers of Sycamore Street" is a poignant, witty and engaging story of a young girl's coming of age.

An illustrated art biography of one of Minnesota's best-known feminist artists "I have been called an artist who represents both a strengthening influence in society and a proactive agent of social change. I work in specific places in the world exploring nature and place, and I work in my studio, where I explore the feminine psyche and archetypes of women." With these words Hazel Belvo describes the prevalent themes and the significant resonance of her extensive artistic career. She arrived in the Twin Cities in 1970 from the East Coast, where she participated in the art world and activism of New York City, as well as the intellectual communities of Cambridge. She joined the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM) in 1976 and soon became a strong voice in this nationally recognized feminist collective.Belvo's art ranges from delicate, sensual pencil drawings to monumentally expressionistic paintings, most notably of the Spirit Tree, an iconic cedar sacred to the Ojibwe along Minnesota's North Shore of Lake Superior. In the first book-length study of this groundbreaking feminist and artist, art historian Julie L'Enfant reviews Belvo's focus on nature, spirituality, mythology, and eroticism during more than forty years of making and teaching art in Minnesota.