Saturday
September 7, 2024 
Artist Suleika Jaouad throws her arms lovingly around guests at opening night of her first-ever art show. She claps her hands with uninhibited joy and pulls strangers to her until their foreheads touch. Jaouad is a picture of health and joy. This is true. And this is not true. It all depends on how you look at it.
At age 22, Jaouad was diagnosed with leukemia and underwent a painful bone marrow transplant. In the past 14 years, she has moved between what writer Susan Sontag calls the “kingdom of the well” and the “kingdom of the sick.” Jaouad’s 2021 memoir, “Between Two Kingdoms,” chronicles her cancer journey, and ability to embrace not only suffering and heartache but also overwhelming love.
The now 36-year-old Jaouad greets opening night attendees in front of her aptly named painting, “The Kingdoms.” The painting contains a progression of small self-portraits, showing her transformation from a healthy young woman to a pale, gaunt, bald, version of herself, naked in a hospital bed, sheets covering her like a shroud, and tethered to IVs.
In another image in “The Kingdoms,” Jaouad is wheelchair-bound, her body exposed, eyes shut, and mouth downcast. The final self-portrait is of Jaoud’s nude body prostrate in Muslim prayer. This painting and her others, Jaouad explains, “are a return to a version of myself and a continuation of that self into the present.”
“The Alchemy of Blood” exhibit at ArtYard features recreations of the fever dreams and hallucinations Jaouad experienced while undergoing another bone marrow transplant during her cancer recurrence two years ago. Compromised vision compelled Jaouad to turn from writing to painting.
“I was making paintings to save my life and find a form of creative expression,” she notes. Faced with the limitations of working from a hospital bed, including the canvas size, and available materials, she was forced to make small paintings, which felt unfinished. The vibrant artwork hung on her hospital room walls, often enticing doctors and nurses to linger.
Jaouad has re-imagined the small studies into large works, inviting visitors into her visions. The central piece of the ArtYard gallery is an unoccupied hospital bed, surrounded by walls on three sides. A video plays on the bed. In it, Jaouad narrates the medical treatment costs and ponders the cost of keeping a body alive, while she lays out her hospital records in a cemetery. Her narration is heard throughout the gallery and serves as the backbone of the exhibit.
“The Alchemy of Blood” is a collaboration between Jaouad and her mother, Anne Francey, and it captures their emotional responses to bodily transitions. Francey’s ceramic shields adorn the walls around the hospital bed and the rest of the gallery. They are a mother’s plea to protect her daughter from the ravages of sickness. Made from ceramic, thread, and hospital ephemera including visitor badges and hospital bracelets, the shields were inspired by burial suits intended to provide physical and spiritual protection in the next realm.
Also on display are two huge canvases of flowers that Francey painted while pregnant with Jaouad. Jaouad, who had not seen the paintings in person until the show, remarks, “I was surprised by the commonalities…even in our choice of color because we created these bodies of work in abstraction from one another. It showcased the creative influence…from my mother: that ability to live in technicolor.”
The technicolor is as much in the paintings as in the throng of visitors on opening night. Guests gather in front of paintings with vibrant backgrounds, on which playful animals intermingle with Jaoud’s self-portraits.
Many opening night visitors belong to The Isolation Journals (TIJ), an online group Jaouad formed during the COVID-19 pandemic to “transform isolation into creative solitude and connection.” TIJ member Pat Taylor trekked from her home in the wilderness of British Colombia to support Jaouad and to meet friends traveling to the show from Hawaii, Texas, and Minnesota. Taylor’s daughter, Sara, died from cancer at 26 years old, while making a film about young adults living with cancer.
Taylor met Jaouad through TIJ and remarks, “Suleika makes everyone feel welcome, heard, seen, respected, and loved. She encourages us to be honest with ourselves and with one another.” She adds, “To have the opportunity to contribute…to a story that honours Suleika’s life-purpose work, Sara and I find that extremely satisfying.”
Guest after guest has a story about their connection to Jaouad, whether or not they have met her. As they view her work, deep emotions rise to the surface and become visible. Jaouad’s memoir ends with the powerful declaration, “I would not reverse my diagnosis if I could. I would not take back what I suffered to gain this.” To observe how her work resonates with others—this—Jaoud says, “…is the greatest gift I could receive.”
“The Alchemy of Blood” exhibit runs through Sept. 22 at ArtYard, 13 Front St., Frenchtown, N.J. For information, visit artyard.org.
Beth Zarret writes occasional columns about the people and places in her beloved towns of New Hope and Lambertville.
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