On Living With Art

Seven years ago this March, I went for an MRI during my lunch break. An hour later, my doctor called. He asked to come into his office as soon as possible. This is never a good sign. He told me I had a tumor inside my spinal cord. I laughed. He pulled up my scans on his computer screen. I cried, and then I wailed.

My doctor said I'd become paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of my life without surgery. He also said I might become paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of my life from surgery. I spent the following weeks taking photos of my feet. I wiggled my toes in videos to memorialize what my wiggling toes looked like. I wanted to remind myself of what my feet had done, in case I’d never do it again.

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On a rainy Thursday afternoon last December, I visited TASWIRA Gallery by appointment with its founder, Avery Barnes. An unexpected trip to New York earlier that month meant I missed the only event I considered cancelling my travel plans for: contemporary artist Cristina Martinez’s first solo exhibition in Washington state on the occasion of the grand relaunch of TASWIRA at its new, historic Pioneer Square location. (This sold-out exhibition closed on January 15, 2025. You can still experience Martinez’s latest mural, No Rain, No Flowers, along the gallery’s exterior.)

Martinez is one of my favorite visual artists. She was raised in Tacoma and is now based here in Seattle, giving this region the good fortune to claim Martinez as its own (despite what I believe to be Seattle’s belated appreciation for her renowned talent). I have three Martinez prints hanging in my apartment. The only artist featured more prominently in my home is Frida Kahlo, the patron saint of chronic pain sufferers (she is also Martinez’s artistic icon). Instead of a television, the wall opposite my couch is lined with over 200 books, accompanied on the left by a reproduction of Kahlo’s The Broken Column (1944). It’s a self-portrait of Kahlo’s exposed, cracked spine held together by a white medical brace. Her breasts are bare. So is her pain. Martinez’s Untitled (2017) hangs on the right. Though the figure is also nude, her body remains intact, save for a single soft pink flower taking the place of her head.

Between both prints, there’s a small black floating shelf that holds two kintsugi mugs that a friend purchased in Japan, where she traveled during the time of my hospitalization. Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer, is a demonstration of how a thing can become more beautiful because of, not despite, its brokenness. Only now sitting here writing this essay do I see the shelf as a line, marking my body and mind’s journey since surgery: a mangled spine in desperate need of beauty to bloom.

At her recent exhibition at TASWIRA, Martinez exhibited 11 new paintings in a collection titled To The Ones Who Remain Unbroken. Her works each demanded long, slow minutes, not moments, to behold. I stood to the far left of the gallery in front of Turn My World Upside Down and wiggled my toes. Disabled but not paralyzed, I needed to ease the quick-onset fatigue from standing in one place for too long. Or perhaps, as it often is with Martinez’s paintings, I projected myself onto the figure’s pose until she no longer felt separate from me, different from me. It was me standing there bent over with my face at the height of my knees. My whole world turned upside down. It was me gazing at my toenails painted orange—a color I’d never choose myself. Those were my toes spread wide, like a child’s eyes in awe at the magic of wiggling. After surgery, the lower half of my body felt like a foot that fell asleep and, for seven years, never woke up. I counted the figure’s toes as I often count mine, just to make sure they’re all still there.

I did not visit TASWIRA to relive fateful moments, months, and years of my life. Yet, if we’re lucky, isn’t this the kind of embodied recognition we seek from great art?

Artists are our greatest interpreters. They translate our selves to ourselves. But they do not do this work alone. We must bring our language of living. Our histories, our stories, our dreams, our grief, our longing, our joys. This is why one person can casually walk past a painting, while that same painting moves another person to tears. This is because to them, a flower isn’t just a flower. It’s the conversations had with a parent before their passing. A picnic table in the sun isn’t just a table, but the post-breakup retreat to Hawai'i to stave off pangs of depressive suicidal thoughts. That full-body hug the figure gives herself is the hug you owe your sister. How do we live with art? By honoring its power to steady our breath.

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“Please don’t let them leave cotton balls in my spine,” I remembered pleading with the nurse before she wheeled me into the operating room. I told her on purpose, hoping her kente cloth scrub cap meant she’d know that “them” meant the surgeons, and the hospital, and the health care system, and white supremacy, and colonialism, and America. I trusted my surgeon, but I’ve also read too much not to consider the fatal routines that make me just another bare Black woman’s back to cut into.

Spinal surgery requires a lot of faith. When my surgeon said he removed the entire tumor, I believed him, even though it took six months to view the MRI scans myself.

When he said I’d walk again, I believed him, even though I barely felt my legs.

When he said not to bend or twist my neck to allow scar tissue to fill in the gaps where bones used to be, I believed him, and I did my best to perfect my posture.

When he said my sutures healed nicely, I believed him, even though I couldn’t see the back of my neck. Touching my stitches and scabs conjured grotesque images in my mind. I asked my sister to take a picture. With my two thumbs—the only fingers that worked well in the days after surgery—I cropped, distorted, recolored, and reoriented the image as soon as my sister handed back my phone. A little hospital bed abstract art project. A creative undoing of any reminder of what had been done to me, for me, for my body, for my life. Surviving gifts us with time to make ugly scars cool. But beauty can be found anywhere, at any time. I stared at my scar art for days.

My scar now looks like a single blade of a Christmas fern pressed into the entire length of my neck. My preferred hairstyles—twist-outs, Bantu knots, and pineapple updos—keep my nape in plain view. A person behind me in line once said, without warning or invitation, “You had a laminectomy. So did I.” I never remember my scar until an encounter with a new lover, who, because of his positional and intimate relationship to my body, sees a side of myself I don’t, or can’t, or refuse to see.

Several weeks after my hospital discharge, I returned to my Seattle apartment, finally alone, recovering from surgery and heartbreak. My incision was closed but not yet healed, and not quite a scar. I tapped the skin, hoping to calm an itch. I felt a bump? A pimple? A keloid? A cyst? I circled the bump gently, trying to picture this too-thin, too-hard, too-tall shape beneath my fingers.

I rushed to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet toward the vanity. I grabbed a compact and tilted it just so, centering myself in this not-fun funhouse of mirrors. A sea of brown, there were many mes everywhere, with floating cotton white dots on my back. The bump was not a bump but a string. Not a string, but a suture that pushed its way out of my skin, like a single blade of grass between cracked concrete, determined to feel the sun.

I raised my eyes and looked around the gallery. I pulled my hand away from my neck and tucked it in my sweatshirt pocket. Avery’s torqued expression silently questioned where my mind had drifted. I told her. Everything. Then, to temper any awkwardness about my overshare, I leaned toward the painting’s label to read the title. “Of course,” I laughed. I’d been her for the last five minutes: A Woman and Her Thoughts.

Martinez is not afraid of color. Huge blocks of solid acrylic paint dance around the canvas. Perhaps that’s why I see it now—the single stemmed leaf growing out of the figure’s spine, at the base of her neck, like a black tadpole readying to swim out into a vast pink ocean. Delicate. Conspicuous. Exposed. I scanned the gallery again, stepping closer to nearby paintings, squinting my eyes at others. Every figure has this stem. I’d been at TASWIRA for over 30 minutes by that point. Why did I only notice it then?

Art be like that sometimes. A long-winded storyteller. A patient teacher. A reticent therapist waiting, hoping we find the answers for ourselves. Before I left the gallery, I purchased a small print of A Woman and Her Thoughts to add to my collection.

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Before returning home, I drove to Athletic Form, a gym owned by Robel Woldu, who’d been my on-again, off-again trainer since I graduated from physical therapy. Like TASWIRA, Athletic Form relocated from its original site where I first met Robel years ago. Also like TASWIRA, Athletic Form’s new space features a minimalistic aesthetic design—sharp lines, bright lights, and open space. What is a gym but an art of bodies in motion?

Robel told me, “There’s something to be said about having an abundance of space—creating space for people to move their bodies. This gym isn’t meant for 200 people to be in here all at one time. And I like that. This is a community. Sometimes people come and don’t even work out. They just hang out.”

I walked into the gym with every intention to make a beeline for the dry sauna. I take my pre-workout warmup literally. But if I’m being honest, I do this to hide because I am still unsure of how to belong among the moving. Gyms were once my playground, and years ago, when I worked as a full-time personal trainer, my office. But now, I struggle in gyms the most. I feel like whatever I do is never enough. Not enough to push myself. Not enough to stop pushing too hard. A fool’s errand, I am still searching for my old self in this new body.

I stopped a few steps onto the gym’s black turf floor to take in the dozen or so gold-framed paintings mounted on every white wall around the gym—a mix of prints and original paintings from local artists. Perhaps it’s because I just left TASWIRA that I noticed, as if for the first time. There is art everywhere, I thought, because art belongs everywhere we are.

I stepped closer to the first wall as if I were still at TASWIRA. Two of Martinez’s prints hang on each side of a group of four—bookends to prints by her partner, Al-Baseer Holly. One print depicts portraits of twelve melanated women, a sea of brown. Their faces resemble Martinez’s own face—one of her signature styles. A single black stemmed leaf grows from each woman’s spine. Martinez reveres bodies in rest, in transition, in blooming. Those lessons had been awaiting my attention all this time.

Athletic Form is more than a gym. TASWIRA is more than a gallery. For Robel and Avery, bringing art into our everyday lives was the vision—which is what taswira means in Swahili. Each space nurtures a sense of community—my community—that encourages us to bloom where we are planted. To remember that change is not the same as broken. Standing before these women, I wiggled my toes again. I promised to honor my selves fiercely, even when—especially when—the world refuses to see us whole.

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Jodi-Ann Burey is a writer and critic who works at the intersections of race, culture and health equity. Her debut book, Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work is forthcoming in September 2025 with Flatiron Books. She is also the creator and host of the prose and poetry salon, Lit Lounge: The People's Art. Find more at litlounge.art and jodiannburey.com