Out of Private Pain of Cancer Comes Public Art

The more cancer disabled the artists’ bodies, the stronger their vision, the sharper their focus.

Three of these 15 cancer patients, whose works are being shown at the University of New Mexico, have died. Another lost an eye. Others have lost breasts or part of a lung, but none surrendered their passion or yielded to fear.

Bea Mandelman, in her 80s, had helpers hold her up while she painted and talked about change.

“I felt the need for a new direction, a breakthrough,” she wrote in a note accompanying her acrylic on canvas, “Shadows No. 3.” “The previous images were about gesture; these have to do with silence.”

She’s still working.

An artist’s note from Martha Slaymaker admitted that she was initially terrified by her illness, but then “I sought innovative solutions to my own survival.”

She changed her diet, exercised, studied self-hypnosis.

“The process of making art, reconnecting with my musical background and numerous other imaginative devices, became important outlets and helped dissipate the panic in recognizing my own mortality.”

She died in January 1995.

*

The “Artlives-Artlives” show, concluding March 15 at UNM’s Jonson Gallery, was Slaymaker’s idea, says co-curator Joseph Traugott.

“Martha started the ball rolling on this but, unfortunately, did not live to see the exhibition,” Traugott said.

Slaymaker’s “Origins XVII” is the first work that the viewer sees upon entering the gallery. It’s a blue-gray montage of pressed clay slabs--cast in plaster--that don’t quite fit but are bound together on canvas with splashes of color.

Her husband, Michael Hudson, says his wife produced hundreds, perhaps thousands, of works in the 20 years that she had cancer.

Helen Hardin, a Santa Clara Pueblo artist who died in the 1980s, also is represented. Hardin’s acrylic on canvas, titled “Last Dance of the Mimbres”--echoing traditional tribal design--was provided by her daughter, who also has a work in the show.

“This is where I live, in the search for ultimate structures,” said the late Harry Nadler, whose oil painting “Night Studio III” is accompanied by works from his wife, Helen, and friend Patrick Nagatani.

Four of the 19 artists represented did not have cancer themselves, but had lost friends or relatives to the disease. Most of the works are by New Mexico artists, but some are from Rhode Island, California and New York.

There are paintings, sculptures, ceramics and photography, each work captioned with the artist’s observations about cancer, life and art.

Amalia Schulthess of Santa Monica, Calif., who lost a close friend to cancer, sent one of her “Assassinated Trees” sculptures--a vine-strangled tree in a coffin.

“Turning pain into art is one step up,” says a poem by Cynthia Barber, whose “Ocean View,” a wrought-iron triptych with sea pebbles, occupies one corner of the gallery.

Barber’s brother died of cancer.

“She and her brother had both collected the rocks that are part of this sculpture,” Traugott said. “The rocks are references to the timelessness of lives and souls and our memory.”

Co-curator Linda Tyler, who is gallery director at Albuquerque’s Tamarind Institute, says the exhibition hopes to emphasize commonalities rather than differences.

“We wish to make the point that art serves as a connector of sorts between the making of objects and the participation of the viewer. . . . The making of art--not unlike the experience of illness--creates a state of mental intensity from which revelation evolves,” Tyler says in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition.

*

The caption for a watercolor by Clinton Adams says he lost his right eye, otherwise viewers couldn’t tell. His watercolor on linen, “Ampurias I,” is more a celebration of the other eye.

“As I began to paint again, I found that the cancer had caused only a delay, not an interruption, in my work,” he says in the caption.

The work is like a window with diagonal shafts of refracted sunlight, but the sun itself is blocked by a dark square.

“It is a direct continuation of the watercolors that preceded it and which continue in progress,” Adams wrote.