Photos by Kim Ritzenthaler Leeso
Shannon Kincaid empowers women through her paintings, which line the walls of the fourth floor of the T. Boone Pickens Cancer Hospital
The elevator door opens to the fourth floor of the Baylor T. Boone Pickens Cancer Hospital, and immediately visitors are greeted by three colorful images on the far wall of the waiting area.
Throughout the women’s cancer unit, 22 paintings by nationally and internationally known Lakewood artist Shannon Kincaid line the walls like an art exhibit, speaking messages of hope and empowerment to the thousands of women who walk by.
“[The paintings] are all about women,” Kincaid explains. “There’s a significant body of my work that has to do with just women — sort of the sacred feminist is my aesthetic that I’m interested in.
“This is a gynecologic oncology unit, so all of the people on the unit are women, and they’re women with some kind of gyn cancer. The paintings are bright and filled with color, and women doing things that women do.”
Kincaid was originally commissioned by the hospital in 2000 to create 12 paintings for the gyn-oncology unit. Recently, she donated 10 more pieces to the unit.
Kincaid began working with Baylor hospital in 1992 after her mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer. (Several years later, she was also diagnosed with breast cancer, and, thankfully, is a survivor of both.)
“She had been given such tremendous care at Baylor. They were so loving and took such great care of her that I wanted to give back. I was so thankful that I offered a year of my time, artistically, to the hospital in whatever form or facet they needed. It was just my way of giving back.”
After the year, Baylor Hospital took her on as the commissioned artist for the hospital, and she’s done many more projects with them since.
“[Being diagnosed with cancer] is just the most terrifying position to be in — even vicariously,” Kincaid explains. “I can’t imagine the journey of someone who’s actually walking it, how that feels.”
Many of the paintings in the women’s cancer unit are very simple. In vivid colors, they capture women going about life, such as three generations of women walking along the beach, or a woman standing in the wind holding her hat in place. Some of the pictures are more abstract and emotional, depicting women in various states of being — contemplative, anguished, insecure, confident — in obscure locations.
Shannon Kincaid’s art is featured throughout the women’s cancer unit at the T. Boone Pickens Cancer Hospital.
“I’ve been making that art since I was about 20. I didn’t really even understand what was drawing me — pardon the pun — to create art about women, but I’ve just always felt sort of pulled to the power that women have,” she says.
“It’s an intrinsic power that, through the eons and millennia, has been taken away from us. It used to be the Earth Mother and goddesses. Women were revered and venerated and powerful, and in past millennia that power and social standing has been taken away. And yet, we still have that power inside of us. It’s just something that I feel and believe in.”
That was the image Kincaid set out to portray in her painting of a woman with ovarian cancer, which now hangs above the check-in counter at the cancer unit. It’s one of her all-time favorite pieces, she says.
She originally painted it in 2007 for the cover of “TORCH: Tales of Remarkable Courage and Hope,” which is a book written by 25 ovarian cancer survivors at Baylor Hospital.
“It had to be conceptual, so I created a powerful woman holding a torch,” she explains. “But instead of facing you, she’s holding it behind her. She’s lighting the way for women who are yet to come with this cancer. The wind is blowing in her face and whipping her all around, yet she’s undaunted and she’s powerful, and her head is bloody but it’s unbowed. And she’s there, holding the light for other people.”
The torch picture holds a special place in the hearts of the staff and patients at the cancer unit, says Linda Gray, nurse manager for Women’s Health at Baylor Hospital. But the other 21 paintings do as well, because of what they represent — women being women.
“When women experience cancer, they don’t stop being normal women who go about life; however, their normal is a new normal,” Gray says, “because it does change them, but they are still just normal women going through life, doing normal things.”
Gray says patients often remark on the paintings, asking who the artist is. Eventually they decided to put plaques beside the paintings because so many people inquired about them.
Kincaid’s husband, C. Allen Stringer, is the chief of OB/GYN and gynecologic oncology at Baylor Hospital. He, too, says not a week goes by that a woman doesn’t remark on the paintings. Some even say the paintings helped them keep walking down the hallway.
“It just reinforces to me the healing power of art,” Kincaid says. “I believe in it with all my heart.”
