On Wednesdays, I have about an hour between appointments, time I would normally spend sitting in the Jardin with a cup of coffee and a pastry, watching people pose in front of the Parroquia, marveling at how easily alliteration springs from my fingertips.

Not today. Something inside me said I didn’t need the coffee. (The previous three cups?) Or the pastry. (The spreading waistline?) As I reached Calle Hernandez Macias a decision needed to be made.

Ahead of me was the pastry, park, Parroquia, and people. To my left was the Centro Cultural Ignacio Ramirez El Nigromante — Belles Arte for the more mellifluously inclined.

Easy enough. I hadn’t been inside Bellas Arte in a while.

The one-time cloistered nuns’ convent was abuzz with students, tour groups, lolling tourists, and rubbernecking curiosity seekers. All my kinds of people. Not a ghost in sight. At the right time of day, you can sit on a bench and feel the ghosts in this venerable structure — ephemeral nuns scurrying to chapel, gardening in the courtyard, or meditating as they circumnavigate the walkway.

Not today, of course. You need peace and quiet. Lots of quiet. Not happening today.

What draws attention these days is the quartet of stunning art exhibitions that fill the rooms on the Bellas Artes ground floor. Each comes with its own ghosts, in a way. Or spirits, if you rather.

The largest and most obvious is La Manta de Curación (The Patchwork Healing Blanket). The rooms, filled with squares inspired by the experiences of their creators, are filled with competing voices of suffering, pain, anger, and hope and repeated calls to stop the violence against women, children, and the environment.

Each “square” — individually made in the blood, experiences, and sorrows of its creator — tears at your heart, impels you to listen to the voices, hear the stories. Pieces of what was once a massive quilt some 600 blocks square are now a collection of tapestries on the walls. All the better. You can approach the individual squares as if meeting the persons who created them. Feel the strokes made by angry or uncertain hands, see the tears upon the cloth, smell the scent of sorrow, think about the courage it might have taken to bare a soul in such a raw fashion.

As the curation text notes, the Healing Quilt was inspired by the artist Marietta Bernstorff and it became the collective project of the women of Mexico and many from around the world. Mexico expresses suffering well but it has no exclusive claim to it. Sadly.

In 2020, the 600-cloth-square quilt filled the grand Zocalo park in Mexico City. It created an event of awareness of the growing violence against women and children. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic added fresh layers of suffering as the project continued around the world.

What is on exhibit here in the Bellas Artes is only a fraction of the grander quilt project. But it is enough. It speaks loudly and eloquently for those who were once voiceless, unheard, unheeded.

Just across the way from The Patchwork Quilt project and an artistic expression of another form of protest against violence to women and and the efforts to deny autonomy to women over their own bodies. It is called “Jacaranda.”

It is a collection of 30 drawings in pencil and acrylics by the artist Indhira of the International Day of Women marches. As the jacarandas bloom in March, so does the collective gathering of women to air the same grievances as the quilters — violence against women and children, bodily autonomy, the rights to self-determination, safety, equality, and respect.

Indhira’s drawings are as immediate and compelling as black-and-white news photos. they put many a face to the women who are struggling for their rights and the right to be heard.

Around the corner in a sala with stark white walls is an exhibition titled “Arte Sacro, una tradición que persiste.” Sacred art in Mexico is most often an expression of suffering of the saints, Virgin Mother, Jesus, and God which we all know is deep metaphor for the earthbound suffering of the people who worship these icons of faith.

Just look at the statue of the Lord of the Columns, recently carried from Atotonilco to a church mere blocks from this Bellas Artes exhibit. It is a graphic and grizzly depiction of Christ whipped to submission by Roman soldiers. His back is ripped and bleeding. His crown of thorns is digging deep into his head. He leans on a low column to support his decimated, ragged, and tearful frame.

The procession last Sunday was largely ceremonial. This exhibit makes room for meditation.

The iconic depictions of the sorrowful God, Mary, and Jesus echo the centuries past but were created in recent years. As if to say, time has no meaning where pain is ever-present. One statue of Mary, surrounded by votive candles and set on a deep window sill, Mater Dolorosa, depicts a dagger piercing her heart.

A likely unintentional connection to contemporary suffering is made when you notice the window behind her — a diaphanous banner heralding the Healing Quilt exhibit shows samples of the squares made by women who share the suffering of Mary, and for reasons not unlike hers.

Entering the sala next door with the pop-cubist art of Alejandro Trejo feels like landing on another planet entirely. His is a happier celebration of San Miguel life and sensibilities. It starts with the panoramic survey of day-to-day life in front of the Parroquia de Arcangel Michael and the Jardin — the heart and lifeblood of San Miguel.

Under the exhibit title, “Ilusion” there is a colorful parade of mojigangas, Dia de los Muertos celebrants, indigenous dancers, religious processioners, Allende and Hildago, wedding participants, the iconic burro, and mariachis.

Other parts of the exhibit include the card set La Loteria de San Miguel de Allende, colorful furniture and dolls, and some brilliant paintings. Trejo’s vision of San Miguel is vibrant, abstract, and fairly humming with a cheerfully disorienting pop perspective of life in this community.

It works almost as a palate cleanser to the other exhibits. Not that their impressions will leave you so easily but and a respite before you leave this sanctuary to face the world outside the convent walls.