Hollis Sigler

Hollis Sigler
Born	March 2, 1948 Gary, Indiana
Died	March 29, 2001 Lincolnshire, Illinois
Nationality	U.S. citizen
Other names	Suzanne Hollis Sigler, Suzanne H. Sigler
Occupation	Artist, educator
Known for	Autobiographical art works

Hollis Sigler (1948–2001) was a Chicago-based artist whose paintings addressed her life with breast cancer. She died of the disease in 2001, at the age of 53. She received degrees from both Moore College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her mature artistic style was faux-naïve, featuring paintings whose subjects, furniture and clothing set in doll-house type interiors and suburban landscapes, were stand-ins for the implicitly female figure. She was an openly lesbian artist and a prominent member of the faculty of Columbia College in Chicago. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985, Sigler’s themes became more personal, confronting ideas about body image, heredity, illness, mortality and hope.

Sigler was born Suzanne Hollis Sigler in Gary, Indiana to Philip Sigler and Marilyn Ryan Sigler. Her family moved to Cranbury, New Jersey when she was eleven. She completed grade school and high school there, receiving her diploma from Hightstown High School in 1966. Accord to her father, Sigler was interested in art as a child and began painting in elementary school. She went on to study art at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, where she was awarded the Bachelor of Arts in 1970; she completed graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received the Master of Fine Arts in 1973.

She had early success with a series of photo realist paintings that depicted underwater swimmers but by 1976, in a gesture meant to repudiate what she considered a male-dominated style, she abandoned realism entirely in favor of a faux-naïve approach. Her subject matter, presented in a way that suggested the work of an untutored or naïve artist, focused on a woman’s world-view. A tendency toward autobiographical content was evident even at the early stages of what would become her signature style. According to the gallery owner Steven Scott, Sigler portrayed

"unpeopled room interiors and fanciful landscapes [that] depict the debris of an incident already climaxed. These scattered objects (along with the provocative handwritten titles appearing on each piece) convey not the cause but the effect of the drama of the departed heroine, whom Sigler acknowledges is her alter-ego."

Scott also observed that beneath the bright colors and expressionistic strokes of the artist's paintings was Sigler's examination of her fears and feelings of inadequacy, and the anger and hurt she felt in her relationships with her parents and lovers. Her paintings often compensated for these feelings with themes of escape and the fulfilment of desire.

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