1. Hollis Sigler: Paintings

2. Life’s Deal: Deck of Cards
Inspired by Lisa Wax
and UIC Spiral Education
Life’s Deal: Deck of Cards
Amber Ward, PhD
ART 135: Secondary School Art Education
California State University, Sacramento

3. Focus Lesson Please complete the Artist Questionnaire for Life’s Deal.
Circle three questions that you would like to explore further.
Then, transform some of the written text from those three questions into simple visual text in the margins of the worksheet. In other words, create visual symbols inspired by your thinking and writing.

4. RISK AND REALITY
Big Idea

5. Key Concepts Risk takers expose themselves to failure.
Risk takers push boundaries.
Artists take risks with content, formal qualities (elements and principals), materials, and/or techniques.
Artists take risks for a variety of reasons.
Reality is socially constructed.
Art often reflect reality.
Art often reflect life.

6. Essential Questions
In what ways do risk takers expose themselves to failure?
How do artists take risks?
Why do artists take risks?
What is reality and how is it constructed?
In what ways does art reflect reality?
In what ways does art reflect life?

7. A contextual overview . . .

8. Hollis Sigler, a leading feminist artist, was diagnosed in 1985 with breast cancer, a disease that had also stricken her mother and great-grandmother.  After it recurred, she began a pictorial journal, encompassing more than one hundred works.  Art in America magazine called Sigler's Breast Cancer Journal "one of contemporary art's richest and most poignant treatments of sickness and health Taking on a kind of religious conviction, her jewel-colored symbols imbue a death-haunted situation with miraculous, celebratory life."  These works—and the commentaries that the artist inscribed on many of them—combine personal experience with family history, medical statistics, and political consciousness raising. 

9. This inspiring volume brings together the sixty finest works from the Breast Cancer Journal in full-color reproductions—paintings, drawings, prints, watercolors, and cut-paper pieces- each accompanied by the artist's commentaries.  Dr. Susan M. Love, a leading authority on breast cancer, discusses the importance of Sigler's art as a document on the disease's personal impact.  "Hollis Sigler gives a voice to the woman struggling with the reality of breast cancer—not the ever-happy face the public wants to see, but the real face of a woman living with a chronic and potentially life-threatening disease.  It is this reality that makes her art so difficult for many women to face, and it is this reality that also makes it so powerful." 

10. James Yood recounts the aesthetic trajectory of Sigler's career, and of the Breast Cancer Journal in particular, drawing parallels with Frida Kahlo, another artist whose life and work were significantly affected by a medical condition.  He is also "reminded of late works by Rembrandt or Pablo Picasso or Ivan Albright, when these artists looked squarely in the face of their death."  He writes of Sigler: "In work after work she explores what it means to love, to enjoy small pleasures, to consider both the wonder and the ambiguities of human relationships, and to inventory the thousand tender wounds of intimacy Sigler's images, with their titles often scrawled across them, constitute a corpus of work revealing the possibilities for a genre painting of the human spirit at the end of the twentieth century." 

11. Sigler herself, in an essay titled "To Kiss the Spirits," writes of her life as a woman, as a lesbian, as an artist, as a person with breast cancer, and as a breast cancer activist, also relating the history of various art projects and exhibitions that culminated in her Breast Cancer Journal, a project undertaken with the hope that "the work would thus gain the power to destroy the silence surrounding the disease."  She also discusses many metaphoric images that appear and reappear in the work, such as the vanity and its mirror, a dead and broken tree, [and] her mother's dress. 

12. Hollis Sigler: Paintings

13. How did Sigler’s life inform her art?

14. In 1997 Hollis Sigler commissioned 52 artists nationwide to design a unique deck of playing cards—mass-produced to raise money and awareness for the Y-Me National Breast Cancer Organization. The original drawings, exhibited at Printworks, sold out before the show even opened.

16. The students will (TSW):
DESIGN 1-3 collages that capture
image; color codes; dealing; collage (Bird, 2012);
consistency of visual language; intentionality; juxtaposition; layers; and/or symbols (Parks, 2015).
RE-CREATE personalized “cards” utilizing their
dealt number and suit, and
simple symbols from the Artist Questionnaire

17. Jesse, Melinda, Kashia, Kim, Sonja

18. Materials Needed Cardboard Cardstock Magazines Newspapers Scissors
X-Acto knives
Acrylic sealer
Paintbrushes
Water cups
Oil pastels

19. Independent Learning (day 1):
Tear-out ~10 images of various sizes from magazines or newspapers to complement the theme of risk and/or reality
Obtain cardboard or cardstock and cut to size (~8” x 10”)
Emphasize relevant magazine images for the collage by cutting or tearing
Play with the juxtaposition of imagery
Once satisfied with the composition, adhere using acrylic sealer. Start with the background.
If time allows, complete more 1-2 more collages

20. Independent Learning (day 2):
If desired, trim the edges of the collage and/or round out the corners
Visualize a plan for the inclusion of oil pastel to address the (a) dealt number and suit and (b) three symbols from the Artist Questionnaire. Also consider the following questions:
What parts of the collage will you reveal and why?
What parts of the collage will you conceal and why?
How will the above decisions address the theme of risk and/or reality?
Begin adding and blending in oil pastel to the dry collage. Keep the surface design imagery fairly simple due to the difficulty of manipulating oil pastels in intricate shapes.