When pink ribbons won’t do: An artist’s fight against breast cancer
Artist Shaney Jo Darden used to design skateboards. Now she works in a different medium: Breasts. She creates plaster casts of breasts, which she then turns over to artists, who…
By Lisa Napoli • • 1 min readawareness, particularly among young women.
Darden feels that this brand of activism is more in line with her community, people in their twenties and thirties, who prefer to paint and pose than to don pink ribbons or participate in walkathons. And it is a way, she says, to convince younger women that they are vulnerable, too.
“It’s a different world now,” she told me when we met at a display of her work at Angel City Brewery that’s up through March 6th. “You can’t wait till your thirties to start thinking about it. It’s not weird to touch your breasts. We educate teenagers about the importance of knowing their bodies.” They even have a self-exam app.
Darden also provides, for free, plaster-cast kits to women who have been recently diagnosed so they can immortalize their bodies. Over the last 13 years, she estimates she’s cast over 1500 torsos. “At some point, I stopped counting,” she said.
What has she learned along the way? “Cancer sucks. No matter how you sugarcoat it, put art on it, it’s a horrible horrible disease.”
Through March 6th at 26 South Alameda Street, Downtown Los Angeles.