Area artist Kay Hartmann has combined creativity and personal commitment to heighten awareness of breast cancer with the interactive exhibit, “What’s wrong with this picture?” on display at Blink Contemporary Art Gallery, 1709 Franklin St. in Michigan City, through Nov. 18.
October is designated as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but Hartmann believes the full impact of breast cancer on the lives of individual women deserves continuous attention in the United States, which has the highest incidence rate in the world. Hartmann, an associate profession of graphic design at Columbia College in Chicago, has drawn on personal experience and professional expertise to come up with a compelling critique of what she calls “the breast cancer experience.”
“As an information designer, my job is to take complex information and organize it in user-friendly, attention-getting ways,” Hartmann said. “That was my goal in creating the work for this show.”
The idea for the exhibit started percolating seven years ago, when Hartmann curated a show for Michigan City’s Lubeznik Art Center called, “Art that Matters.”
“That idea intrigued me,” Hartmann said. “Since then, I’ve been interested exclusively in finding and creating art that matters, at least to me.”
Breast cancer mattered a great deal to Hartmann when she was diagnosed with it seven years ago, at the age of 53. She had already experienced the loss of a close college friend, Nancy, who died from breast cancer at the age of 40 more than 20 years ago.
“So many women have this disease,” Hartmann said, noting that 1 in 8 women in this country have or have had breast cancer. “My motivation was to shine a spotlight on the situation and hope people will take it seriously.”
She wanted to know as much as possible about the causes, cures and treatment options for breast cancer. In the process of doing some research, she was struck by the imbalance between the total funds raised to fight breast cancer and the small amount spent on finding the cause. She notes that more than $50 billion has been spent over the past 60 years to treat breast cancer, not to cure it.
“Why, with so much research conducted and money spent on breast cancer, do we still know so little about what causes this disease?” Hartmann asks. ”I don't begin to know the answer to this question.”
She uses nine key pieces of information tied to visual imagery to encourage gallery visitors to think about and comment on how to end breast cancer. They’re invited to insert a note into a plastic prescription pill container. Some of the prescriptions Hartmann recently pulled out were: money, getting rid of poisonous chemicals in diet drinks and offering free cancer treatments.
Hartmann feels fortunate that a mastectomy removed her breast cancer and she didn’t need chemotherapy. She depicts the standard breast cancer treatment options in the poster: poison, slash or burn. In another display, Hartmann gives viewers the option of lifting a pink flap to see a photograph of a breast amputation.
Perhaps the most powerful image in the exhibit hangs in the middle of the gallery. It is a pink noose surrounded by a picture frame.
“It’s a framed pink ribbon turned upside down,” Hartmann said, indicating what she sees as the need to put more emphasis on what’s causing breast cancer and less on maintaining the status quo.
“One in eight women have this pink noose around their necks. I don’t see it going away any time soon, given the way we currently fund breast cancer.”
Hartmann is proud of having the courage to emerge from being an angry victim of breast cancer to an empowered artist with the ability to convey the full impact of the disease on others as well. The exhibit has promoted healing and provided a way to honor her friend Nancy.
“I felt so powerless when she died,” Hartmann said. “This is partly a tribute to my friend. I do think doing this has helped me deal with her death and my own disease.”