THE BACKSTORY

In 1945, when penicillin was still scarce and two young children lay frequently bedridden in Michigan, Donna Morin's mother made a decision that would alter the family's trajectory: they would drive to California in search of wellness. Loading their sick children—five-year-old Donna and her brother—into a used house trailer, her father stocked up on rationed re-tread tires and pointed the family westward on Route 66.

The journey took months. They stopped at every outpost along the legendary highway, each pause a small victory, each mile bringing them closer to the promised warmth of the California sun. For young Donna, weak from illness but wide-eyed with wonder, the cross-country odyssey imprinted itself permanently onto memory—the rhythm of the road, the anticipation building with each state crossed, the gathering glow of pink, peach, and golden yellow as they finally approached the Pacific coast.

Pink Cadillac, Route 66 recreates this formative journey on an appropriately epic scale—43 × 86 inches, stretching wide like America itself. Tire tracks score the canvas, honoring those precious re-treads that made the trip possible. Circular forms, drawn from Morin's printmaking practice, dot the composition like the outposts where the family paused to rest. The palette blazes with California sunset hues—the warm welcome that greeted them at journey's end and promised the healing they desperately sought.

The title evokes iconic mid-century Americana, but the abstraction is pure Morin: nostalgia filtered through modernist sensibility, personal history transformed into painterly gesture. This is memory as landscape, illness as catalyst, and Route 66 as the literal path to the life she would build over the next eight decades in Southern California—a life made possible by one family's westward gamble on better weather and second chances.