Interrupted

“We were in New York at the Frick Museum …” That’s how Aimee Mann begins her song At the Frick Museum.

The moment I first heard those words, I paused. I knew exactly which painting she was singing about— Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music, c. 1658–1661—and exactly the feeling she was evoking.

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(Johannes Vermeer, Girl Interrupted at Her Music, c. 1658–1661, Oil on Canvas)

I had been to the Frick as a child, one of those museum visits that blur into hushed voices. Back then, I didn’t notice the painting. I might have walked right past it. I certainly didn’t feel interrupted by it.

Years later, in my early twenties, I read Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen’s memoir. And it hit me. The title—borrowed from Vermeer—suddenly gave the painting a new meaning. I became obsessed with the idea of seeing it again. But I kept forgetting or postponing it.

Until finally, in the summer of 2019, I went to the Frick, ready to feel something. Only… I didn’t.

The painting shows a girl seated and a man beside her, a painting behind them, and music sheets and a cittern on the table. She looks up from her music, gazing at us. We become part of the scene. She is caught mid-moment. There is music, silence, and something unsaid. It’s intimate and unsettling.

But I didn’t feel the urgency or sadness the memoir had prepared me for. Not yet, anyway, maybe because my interruptions hadn’t happened.

I read Girl, Interrupted during a stressful, emotionally charged time in my early twenties. I was surrounded by people (me included) who were struggling. The political crisis back home in Venezuela only heightened the anxiety. There was always worry in the background. My father would say, “El chavismo le robó el futuro a los venezolanos.” (Chavismo stole the future of Venezuelans). And I think about that now, not just as a political statement but as something personal. It interrupted a country, families, lives, and stories.

In 2021, Aimee Mann released Queens of the Summer Hotel, an album inspired by Girl, Interrupted. I’ve loved her music for years. Her songwriting is sharp and vulnerable. But I obsessed over this song At the Frick Museum. The arrangement feels like a corridor, spare strings and soft piano echo like footsteps. There’s a stillness to it, a kind of interior hush that mirrors Kaysen’s reckoning. You can hear the influence of early Romantic composers giving the track an anachronistic elegance that roots it in the memoir’s late-1960s setting without being literal. Her voice, almost whispered, carries a weight that feels private and introspective. The background harmonies flicker in and out, like thoughts you're trying not to think.

That year, I was working at a gallery in Mexico City. I felt lost, interrupted. I played At the Frick Museum in the mornings while getting dressed for work, in my AirPods while typing on my computer, walking out for coffee in San Miguel Chapultepec, in Ubers on the way home, and running errands. It became part of my daily landscape. A way to remember who I was still trying to be.

And then, just this past Thursday, the Frick reopened after an almost five-year renovation. Even the museum itself had been interrupted, its collection temporarily relocated to the Brutalist Breuer building on Madison Avenue. A kind of exile. Now it's back home.

And there she was again: the girl, her music, the interruption.

This time, I felt it.

I thought about how I had been interrupted, too. By a pandemic. By fear. By immigration. By a return to law. And most of all, by grief. My father died in 2022. His absence was like a low note that never resolves, always there, resonating beneath everything else. Suddenly, nothing I had planned felt real anymore.

But here I was. Full circle. Back in New York. At the museum. With my husband.
Staring at a painting that once felt distant and now felt like a mirror.

My path in the arts, my dreams of this city, all paused, rerouted, suspended, but never gone. Just… interrupted.

- Additional note – A special exhibition is coming soon at the Frick, “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” from June 17 to September 8, 2025.

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