Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Born in northern Indiana, Hollis Sigler was associated with a strong group of modern realist artists working out of the Chicago area. While preferring representational subjects, her work after the late 1970s reflects a more emotional, imaginative quality. Her childlike “neo-naïve” style and theatrical presentations depict personal narratives in bold shapes and colors, often featuring evocative titles or annotations on the prints, their frames, or both.

Despite their apparent playfulness, Sigler’s images are complex and often painful “visual poems” about herself as a woman. In 1992, after developing breast cancer, her work – known as the Breast Cancer Journal–began to focus solely on her struggles with the disease. These images are filled with recurring metaphors of pain and loss: a vanity with a broken mirror, a bleeding sky, and dying trees. Nevertheless, as the bandages on the tree limbs, bright sun, and the text in this print suggest, she still retained some hope of being cured. Unfortunately, it was not to be.