The Journey of the Brooklyn Bridge

By: Cathy Salter

This is the story of a piece of art and how it ended up traveling to Brooklyn during the Covid-19 pandemic.  It is one that bridges decades, chapters in life, and a friendship born from a literary connection.  Before purchasing a painting, Kit and I have always followed “the five-minute rule.”   If a connection happens for both of us with the artist and canvas within that time, we invite it into our lives and onto the walls of our home.  And so, it was on a summer day in 1987 when we walked into Hanson Art Gallery in Sausalito, CA and purchased a serigraph of the Brooklyn Bridge.  

At that time, we were about to leave Los Angeles where we had lived and taught for a decade and move to Washington, D.C. to begin working with National Geographic.  We’d purchased a four-story brownstone in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood that had high ceilings and an abundance of wall space for art.  Hanson’s gallery shipped the framed Brooklyn Bridge serigraph directly to our new home in the heart of the capital, and there it settled in with us until we relocated to Missouri two years later.  Since then The Brooklyn Bridge has hung at Breakfast Creek, taken a brief trip to Albuquerque for seven months, and has been back with us in Missouri since 2005.  Until two weeks ago, it commanded a wall in our home at Boomerang Creek, dominating one end of a corridor filled with works by local MO artists and a 6 ft. x 6 ft. quilt from Lexington, KY.

~See more in the Boone County Journal~