To bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness month, The Art Department honors Hollis Sigler. In 1985, Sigler was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her work from the 1990s until her death from cancer in 2001 dealt with the personal pain of the disease and its effect on society. In 2001, Sigler was honored with the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Chicago Caucus for Women in the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award.
Sigler said that she utilized a childlike, faux-naïf style as a reaction against a patriarchal culture that treated women as little more than children. Her style was also a means of conveying difficult emotional content in a way that viewers could easily understand.
Born in Gary, Indiana, Sigler earned her Master of Fine Arts from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1973. Sigler established herself as part of Chicago’s art scene during a period when artists there were challenging New York City’s cultural hegemony. Familiar with Chicago’s Hairy Who group, which emphasized cartoons and other popular imagery, and the whimsical art of Florine Stettheimer, Sigler found quirky precedents for her own idiosyncratic approach.
For Hollis Sigler, breast cancer was deeply rooted in her family’s history. Both Sigler’s great-grandmother and mother died from the disease prior to her own diagnosis in 1985 at the age of 37. Though the artist underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy, by 1993, the cancer had spread throughout her body.
Despite these difficulties, Sigler almost immediately began creating artwork that engaged with her illness. In 1992, having already spent years living with breast cancer, she remarked in an interview that she knew she would someday die of the disease, a realization that she said transformed the way she approached her art practice.
Hollis Sigler, Some Kind of Love (1992). Photo courtesy MCA Chicago.
