Inspiring Art
January, 1999
by Kristen Grubbs '88
Reprinted from The Bulletin, the alumni/ae magazine of The Williston Northampton School, Easthampton, MA. For more information, visit www.williston.com

As a "monument to women and girls who have pushed traditional boundaries--of sports and otherwise," Jeanne Hyland '71 began creating her work, Title IX, with the intention of celebrating women's achievements in athletics. Hyland has long been interested and involved in women's sports, having spent many years teaching skiing on the western slopes where she has lived since graduating from college. Currently living in Westminster, Colorado, she still spends three days a month on the ski trails in nearby Loveland. However, the 35-inch bronze sculpture, began, in the process of creation, to take on a more direct and powerful personal significance in her life. When Hyland received a call saying she had an abnormal mammogram, the piece began to serve as a "distraction" for Hyland as she went through the "unnerving process" of two biopsy surgeries.

Hyland explains, "Working on the sculpture gave me something to focus on in the here and now, avoiding the flights of mind into the realm of fear/fantasy and worst-case scenarios. Feeling the physicalness of the clay and working with my hands were calming and reassuring."

As she explains, "the piece then came to mean something else to me--the bravery and achievements of the women who have fought breast cancer."

Out of this powerful beginning, the significance of the work grew. In the fall of 1997, Hyland noticed a call for entries in an arts publication for an exhibit being planned as a fundraiser for breast cancer research. The bronze sculpture was quickly was accepted and sent to San Francisco to join the show. An exhibition of mixed media art and writing by women who have faced breast cancer, the exhibit represents more than 75 professional and non-professional artists and writers from the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Entitled Art.Rage.Us., the show "presents deeply moving and beautiful expressions from women with breast cancer, along with intensely personal statements that provide a window into their hearts and minds," says Susan Claymon, Project Coordinator. Opened in San Francisco last spring, the show is also covered in a book and will be showing in Los Angeles this spring.

When asked about the origins of her interest in sculpture, Hyland identified early academic support as influential. While she says that she did not choose Northampton School for Girls in 1969 specifically for its art program--"it was not planned"--the art that she did while there from 1969-1971 was a formative part of her successful career in art today. She explains, "It is still very unusual to find sculpture being taught at all in schools."

At NSFG, art teacher Jerry Wyman, a sculptor himself, was "very encouraging about getting into sculpture." Her first year at NSFG, Hyland began doing stone carving in a studio in the basement of one of the dorms. With the increased student interest, the Carriage House was soon transformed into an art studio. Hyland continued her work in stone and wood carving her senior year, as well as exploring drawing and print making. These efforts culminated in Hyland's senior project in sculpture. She produced a three-foot walnut carving, an abstract organic form that has been residing since 1971 graduation in the home of classmate Deborah Belsky '71 (now in New York City).

After NSFG, Hyland "stumbled into a remarkably good art school, the University of New Hampshire," where she earned a B.F.A. with a focus in figurative sculpture, drawing, and watercolors. The summer of her sophomore year she returned to France to attend an art camp, and stayed for a year's study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in St. Etienne. France was significant to her development as an artist, for her eyes were opened to the work of Rodin and other European sculptors, and her free time was spent with her sister Janet Hyland '71 on the ski slopes of the Alps, where her love of sports began.

In Colorado, Hyland has used her art sensibilities to develop a very successful graphic design career to support her sculpture work. She is currently doing multi-media and web design as well as print materials for the high-tech industry, and has won national design awards. Three years ago, she was inspired to return to focusing more energy on sculpture, and got involved in the thriving figurative sculpture community in Loveland (the same community where sculptor Dee Clements cast his bronze sculpture, The Actor, which was commissioned and donated to Williston Northampton by Kurt Shafer '69 last year). Last summer she showed her work at the largest outdoor sculpture show and sale in the world, the Annual Loveland Sculpture Invitational Show.

Hyland summarizes her art by saying, "The challenge for me is turning forms in space and the play of light on them-giving them believable, 'expansive form' as Rodin called it. Figures express such universal, archetypal concepts that they are tireless subjects--metaphors for life's experiences." The focus that Hyland has given in such pieces as Title IX to "the inner strength and nobility of creatures expressed through their gestures and physical form" has evidently arisen from her own inner strength.

In responding to her own diagnosis, (a positive one: she has a form of a precancer that can be carefully monitored), Hyland explains that she became more of an activist for the cause. She realized that her "art can be used in more than just a commercial sale way," to inform and educate too. Indeed, the energy and power of her work is an inspiration, in many different ways, to us all.

The exhibit Art.Rage.Us will be opening in the Gallery of the Los Angeles Public Library on March 6, 1999 and will run until May 30.

Further information can be had from the Breast Cancer Fund at 800-487-0492 It can also be seen in the book Art.Rage.Us published by Chronicle Books.

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