Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

The painting "Once in a Blue Moon" by Beanie Kaman of Santa Fe is in the New Mexico Cancer Center's permanent collection. It hangs inside the doorway of a vault housing a linear accelerator used in treating cancer with radiation.

Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

Antonia Hepner receives her first chemotherapy treatment at the New Mexico Cancer Center. Behind her is a wall of original artwork, part of a revolving exhibition numbering more than 200 pieces.

More Local

• ABQTrib.com to remain available
• Former Marine to serve two years in jail for killing Albuquerque robber
• Wilson-Pearce battle for U.S. Senate exemplifies party's disparity

MOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

• ABQTrib.com to remain available
  08:48 a.m., February 25, 2008
• Congressman is indicted
  08:37 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Series of attacks target Green Zone
  08:36 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Iran is defying U.N., agency says
  08:35 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Waterboarding approval probed
  08:34 a.m., February 23, 2008

TRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

• Ty Murray Invitational thrills fans in Albuquerque
• Is Rome Burning?
• Ominous Skies
• The Road to Invalidation
• Albuquerque company participates in “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

SHARE THIS STORY [?]

Carol Gutierrez says she's "not an art kind of girl." But she became one, in the most unlikely of places.

Diagnosed with cancer last spring, Gutierrez found herself passing hours at the New Mexico Cancer Center in chemotherapy, or waiting for lab results or doctor visits. She found herself staring at the walls.

There she saw a dazzling collection of original artwork - paintings, prints, photographs, collages and sculptures - by a who's who of New Mexico artists.

"You sit there, flipping through magazines, and eventually you get up and look at the art," she said. "In the predicament you're in, the different pieces all mean something different to you. You look at them in a new perspective."

The artwork came to mean even more to Gutierrez, who had to leave her job during her difficult fourth round of chemo. She struggled to pay her living expenses plus medical co-pays and prescription drug costs.

Gutierrez applied for financial help from the center's nonprofit foundation. "I forgot all about it," she said. "Then one day I got home and there was a message on my machine saying the center would pay several months of my rent. I just started bawling. It took the burden off."

The New Mexico Cancer Center is a place to get medical treatment. It's also the state's largest contemporary fine art exhibition and sales gallery. And a portion of proceeds from those sales help fund the foundation, which raises money to help low-income patients meet such nonmedical expenses as rent, child care, food and transportation.

"It's a life raft for patients," said Marti Fournier-Revo, director of the foundation, which also receives individual and corporate donations. "A diagnosis of cancer often means the loss of a job, and often a spouse must also stop working to care for a patient. It poses a significant hardship for cancer patients and their families."

Since set up in 2002, the foundation has granted a total of about $140,000 to more than 200 patients. Art sales last year alone totaled $43,500, with 21 buyers picking up 40 works. Twenty percent of sales goes to the foundation.

Barbara McAneny, CEO of New Mexico Oncology Hematology Consultants Ltd., a cancer practice founded in 1987, said the gallery was conceived as the 15-physician group planned the New Mexico Cancer Center. The center, which opened in 2002 in the north I-25 corridor, is a 35,000-square-foot outpatient treatment site offering medical oncology, radiation oncology, clinical trials, laboratory and imaging.

"We asked patients what they wanted, and they wanted light, beauty and color, and to feel like they were not in a hospital," McAneny said.

The building was designed with art in mind - lots of open wall space lit by strategically placed windows. Private medical information was hidden so the space could be viewed by the public.

"We decided this would be a gallery with the art displayed to its best advantage," McAneny said. "Art can be a living part of another space and still be a gallery."

But by the time the center was completed, the practice had run out of money to buy art. McAneny sat down with artist friends Wilson Hurley and Russell Hamilton and talked about what to do.

Lester Libo's name came up. Hurley and Hamilton knew the Albuquerque art dealer. And Libo had at one point approached McAneny about selling her art for the center.

"He had more art than walls and I had more walls than art," McAneny said.

She proposed to Libo that the center become a gallery featuring a rotating exhibition curated by him, with a portion of sales benefiting the foundation.

He jumped at the chance. "I was excited about it," Libo said. "It's not daunting. It's a high."

The current show has 217 pieces by 33 artists, mostly New Mexicans. The first show in 2002 had 150 pieces by 10 artists.

Half the show is swapped out every three months, and the center throws a wine-and-cheese opening attended by the artists, public and, often, patients.

The pieces range in price from a few hundred dollars to thousands, but most are under $1,000.

Libo said he has no trouble finding artists to exhibit. "I get requests all the time from people who want to be included," he said.

He's attracted such big names as Robert Ellis, Douglas Kent Hall, Patrick Nagatani, Kim Arthun, Lilly Fenichel, Miguel Gandert, Kirk Gittings, Betty Hahn, Ed Haddaway and Aaron Karp.

Arthun, a gallery owner as well as artist, has appeared in two shows at the center and says the range of work always surprises him. "Out of the blue I'll run into somebody who has seen the gallery, either as a patient or family member, and says how nice it to have the artwork there," he said. "To me, that's the payback."

Attendance at openings, and sales, has grown year to year, Libo said.

"We're getting the word out to the public that this building is a fine-art resource," Fournier-Revo said.

McAneny said the gallery has succeeded beyond her expectations. "We love it. The patients love it. The staff loves it," she said.

The art is therapeutic, she said. "Instead of sitting in a scary waiting room reading old magazines, the patients wander up and down the halls looking at paintings. Sometimes we lose patients. We call their name and they're off with the art," she said. "I overhear people talking about, arguing about the pieces. Patients become art critics."

Here's the bottom line to McAneny: "Art gives the message to cancer patients that just because you are fighting this disease, it doesn't mean that you've lost interest in the rest of life. Art, light and beauty are just as important now as at any other point in your life."

She likens the effect to the Navajo concept of walking in beauty, "when you can look outside yourself for a moment and admire a painting, landscape or photograph."

"You become more balanced," she said. "It gives you a feeling of what to fight for."

Says Gutierrez, who is now cancer-free: "A cancer center isn't really a happy place, but the art makes it happier for a while."