Gallery Wall

Gallery Three.
North wall blank, waiting.
Tomorrow the Rothkos arrive,
those floating fields of color
that breathe their own weather.

A palm runs along the surface,
finds the ghost-map of nail holes.
This wall has held Picassos,
Pollocks,
each leaving shadows
in the plaster.

The Rothkos know this.
How absence
creates presence.
How the space between colors
holds more
than color itself.

Across the room,
opposite wall.
Thirty water towers
painted by seven-year-olds.
Same tower,
thirty different skies.

Maria painted hers
crying.
Jason made his a rocket.
Small hands held brushes
like birds,
like prayers.

This wall
has held community art for decades.
Quilts
from the senior center,
photographs
of the dissolved mill.

The opening’s tomorrow.

Parents will come with cameras.
The Rothko crowd
will pass through politely.
But the south wall
knows what matters.
Someone saying
I was here.

Years pass.
The north wall
receives shadow boxes
holding nothing but light
and its interruption.
The artist learned
at Yale
how emptiness
can be full.

She touches the surface,
finds the slight depression
where the Rothkos hung.

Her boxes dialogue
with their ghosts.

But something pulls her gaze across.
The south wall
holds new children’s work,
and there,
impossible but true,
her own purple tower from third grade, wings she couldn’t explain
then.

Mrs. Hsiao’s after-school class.
That girl
knew something about space
this woman
spent decades learning to forget,
then remember differently.

Now the south wall
holds her granddaughter’s painting. “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.” A swirl of purple and gold
that could be a dancer,
a storm,
a Friday feeling.

The artist is eight,
already sure.
The wall receives it all.

North wall, south wall.

Same room, different worlds.
One holds silence that costs thousands,
the other crayon marks
worth more.

Between them,
air
where visitors pivot, choosing which beauty
to believe.

After closing,
in the gallery’s dark,
shadow boxes speak to children’s suns.

The conversation space allows.
Between high and humble,
silence and laughter,
what we think art is
and what art knows
itself to be.
The mark that says
we’re here,
we see,
we dare
to show it.