Hollis Sigler, Created Art Inspired By Battle With Cancer, 53
DGH
Hollis Sigler, a Chicago-based artist whose autobiographical narrative
paintings often focused on her long struggle with breast cancer, died of
the disease on Thursday at her home in Prairie View, Ill. She was 53.
Ms. Sigler's early work was abstract expressionist, then photo-realist.
But in 1976, trying to disengage from what she viewed as a male-
dominated academic tradition, she shifted to a sweetly colored faux-
naïve mode. The results were deeply personal depictions of domestic
settings and suburban landscapes, with links to the art of Florine Stett
heimer, 19th-century Hudson River School painting and Chicago's
so-called Hairy Who school of cartoon- and folk-influenced work. In 1985
Ms. Sigler's cancer was diagnosed, and she had a mastectomy and
chemotherapy; the cancer recurred in 1989 and 1992, spreading to her
bones. "I realized this was not something that was going to go away,"
she said in an interview in The New Art Examiner in 1994. "I really do
have to live with this disease, and probably die with this disease. With
this in mind, I decided to change my work." Her paintings during the
1990's incorporated specific references to cancer in images of
fragmented bodies and texts added to the works. A series of oil pastel
paintings titled "Breast Cancer Journal: Walking With the Ghosts of My
Grandmothers" (1992-1993) included historical information and
statistical data on the disease, from which Ms. Sigler's mother and
grandmother also suffered. The series was exhibited at the National
Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, and "Hollis Sigler's Breast
Cancer Journal," a book of related essays by Ms. Sigler, Susan M. Love
and James Yood, was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1999. Ms. Sigler,
who was born in 1948 in Gary, Ind., attended the Moore College of Art in
Philadelphia and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received
an honorary doctorate from Moore College in 1994. She taught at Columbia
College in Chicago for more than 20 years. She was represented by Carl
Hammer Gallery and Printworks Gallery in Chicago and Steven Scott
Gallery in Baltimore and was a founding member of Artemisia in Chicago,
one of the first women's cooperative galleries in the United States. She
also showed with Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York in the early
1980's. This year she was awarded the College Art Association's
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement; she also received
the Chicago Caucus for Women in the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Sorry for the multiple posts. My newsreader must have had a hiccup.
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