When I read the curators name from that letter to the young woman at the museum, she drew in a breath and said, Mrs. Ortega, we have wondered for years what happened to Rauls work, and if those sculptures are still standing, they are important, and no commission has any business calling them junk.
The historic district chairwoman stood in my yard, pointed at Rauls dancing woman, and told me the sculptures violated the design guidelines, that Id have thirty days to remove them or face five hundred dollars a day and a lien.
She did not know what Raul welded into the dancing womans base.
The first sculpture Raul ever made, in 1973, had a little iron box welded into its base that he said held something in her heart, and inside was a letter on museum letterhead from New York, a standing offer to acquire his work, proof that my husband was a recognized artist whose pieces belong in a collection, not in a dumpster.
Raul made his coyote and his heron and his dancing woman out of car parts and horseshoes, and people stopped on the sidewalk every day to look. He never told me a New York museum had written him. He sealed the letter in the dancing womans heart, and I cut it open with his own torch and found it.
Recognized works of art by a collected artist are not junk a commission fines you for. The museums interest, and the value it puts on Rauls pieces, turned the chairwomans junk into exactly the kind of cultural work a historic district ought to be proud of.
When the chairwoman came back, I did not argue. I handed her a copy of the museums letter and I said, thirty days, you said, that was generous. Heres a New York museums standing offer for the work your neighbors call junk. Fine me, and youll be fining a collection a museum wants. The dancing woman stays, and so do the coyote and the heron.
The fines never came. The museum is talking with me now about showing Rauls work, with the pieces that want to stay in the yard staying in the yard. People still stop on the sidewalk to look.
The neighbors think its junk, she told me. A New York museum thought it was art, and Raul knew it all along, and left the proof in the heart of the first thing he ever made.