Previvor Hosts “365 Canvas Sheets” Art Exhibit to raise money for the Lori Loeb and Susan Guthmann Fund at NorthShore

What: Previvor Hosts “365 Canvas Sheets” Art Exhibit to raise money for the Lori Loeb and Susan Guthmann Fund at NorthShore University HealthSystem.

The 365 canvas sheets represent a year of being a “previvor,” a term describing someone who preempts cancer. Each piece on its own can be seen as a separate response, like a daily journal, documenting the fragility and strength of the body as it heals.

Caren Helene Rudman, a local artist in Chicago’s north shore, uses her own personal experiences with cancer pre-vivorship, working with mixed media, photography, and writing; exploring how energy comes through the body within the process of making art. Her work examines the dichotomies between inside and outside, mind and body and health and disease. She delves into the notion of genetics, linking past and future generations, revealing the process of letting go, and of rebuilding.

When: Artist’s Reception Friday July 7, 7 - 9 pm

Where: New Studio

2948 Central Street, Evanston

Fee: (no entrance fee) A portion of each painting sold will be donated to the Lori Loeb and Susan Guthmann Fund for breast and ovarian cancer research and personalized medicine at NorthShore University HealthSystem.

About the artist: She credits genetic testing and pre-emptive surgeries for “saving her life”. Rudman, now 50, an artist and the mother of four, had a preventive hysterectomy at 39 and a mastectomy when she was 47. Her sister, a single mother, had a breast cancer scare and so she, too, had both a mastectomy and hysterectomy when she was 51. Sadly, these preventive surgeries were too late for Loeb, who died of ovarian cancer last summer at the age of 54, leaving behind her five-year-old daughter Rebecca.