Can a Painting Save You?

My parents raised me in the faith, but my mother raised me in museums. When I was still traveling by stroller, she would take me on the Command Express bus from our neighborhood in Canarsie, Brooklyn, into Manhattan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later, when she recalled these trips, she told me that going between any two points within the Met had taken forever, because I would ask her to stop in front of nearly every painting so she could tell me about it. I can never remember a time when I didn’t love art. Even though I am nearly forty years old, I am still not sure if I love art for my own reasons, or if I love art because my mother loved it, and so it is a way of loving her.