"This was not supposed to happen at all, I was not supposed to get sick," wrote artist Hollis Sigler in "To Kiss the Spirits," the autobiographical essay in her Breast Cancer Journal ( 1999 ) .
Sigler, who taught art at Columbia College Chicago for more than 20 years, died of cancer last year at the age of 53, but she left a legacy of art and activism that will be honored by her colleagues in the exhibition To Kiss the Spirits: An Artists Homage to Hollis Sigler running Oct. 4-25 at Artemisia Gallery, 700 N. Carpenter. To Kiss the Spirits is sponsored by the Art and Design Department of Columbia College Chicago. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. For information call ( 312 ) 226-7323.
Launching the exhibition, for which seventy internationally recognized artists have created one-of-a-kind original artwork, is a benefit preview show and sale Oct. 3 from 7-9 p.m. at Artemisia. The benefit, and proceeds from the sale of artwork, will establish the Hollis Sigler Memorial Endowment Fund which will provide scholarships to visual arts students at Columbia College Chicago. Tickets to the Oct. 3 benefit are $75 and the price can be applied toward the purchase of an original artwork on that evening. Call ( 312 ) 663-1124, ext. 3.
Being On the Edge of Hope, an original framed lithograph signed by Hollis Sigler will be raffled. The drawing will be held on the last day of the exhibit and tickets are $10 each. Proceeds from the raffle will benefit the endowment fund. Being on the Edge of Hope was generously donated by Patricia Locke, executor of the Hollis Sigler Estate.
"The number of artists participating indicates the impact that Hollis had upon other artists," said exhibition curator and Columbia professor Marlene Lipinski. "In terms of the contemporary era, Hollis used personal issues...her political and feminist issues as a woman artist and her 15-year struggle with breast cancer...in the content of her painting. Her stature as an artist both legitimized the use of personal issues in art and helped many individuals come to terms with long-term illness."
An academically trained painter of the realist school, Sigler reinvented her artistic vision and style in the late 1970s. In 1985 she learned that nature had reinvented her body. For a half-dozen years, Sigler kept her struggle with cancer private, but in 1991 she learned that her breast cancer had metastasized into her bones. Her subsequent emotional struggles and her frustrations regarding the inadequacies of medical information, care, and resources for both herself and millions of other women living with cancer, inspired her to become engaged in an artistic activism that sought to educate the public and eradicate the social stigma of cancer.
Sigler died in March, 2001, succumbing to the disease that had claimed both her mother and grandmother and she left a legacy that helped empower individuals from all walks of life...from private citizens to world-class athletes and politicians...to speak openly about living with cancer.
Sigler also left a remarkable body of work. As Professor James Yood wrote in his introductory essay in the Breast Cancer Journal, "Hollis Sigler is not an artist because she has breast cancer; Hollis Sigler is an artist with breast cancer. "She brings to her current challenge, to all its moments of despair, revelation, poignancy, sorrow, exhilaration, agony, hope, dejection, frustration, and tenderness, precisely the same extraordinary pictorial skills and intuitive sensitivities that have made her for two decades an artist with remarkably tender and nuanced considerations of the muddied passages of the human heart."
There are dozens of participating artists in To Kiss the Spirits.