DANA DONATY Mile Marker 58: A Softer Way Through
On display in the Alumni Gallery, May 3 - July 12, 2025.
The artist chronicles her healing journey and draws inspiration from Hélène Cixous’ proclamation: 'Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.' Donaty reclaims both her narrative and her body by painting herself larger than life—front and center—confronting her challenges with invisible disabilities and cancer on her own terms..
With this gesture, she disrupts Western patriarchal norms of medicine—forging her own healing path supported by family, friends, shamanic energy practices, meditation, creation, nutrition, and a celebration of her body’s strength, magic, beauty, and hope.
The artworks follow a timeline before and after the cancer diagnosis. A standout piece, Untitled 1, depicts two arrows embedded in the area where the kidneys reside, prior to the diagnosis-speaking to the body's intelligence and its integration into the painting, becoming both mirror and map. While she was faced with mortality, her work was busy making new life—insisting on becoming something entirely new.
The ensuing paintings focus on palette carrying a strong feminist charge, finding comfort in color: pink, embraced as a healing force; green, signaling new growth; and beige borders, symbolizing the margins of a book’s page-turning to a new chapter. Mile Marker 58: A Softer Way Through chronicles a pivotal point in Donaty’s life, as she embraces radical acceptance and finds the grace to land gently with her health experiences, easing down a new path—becoming a softer, reimagined self.
"The future must no longer be determined by the past…We’ve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them…Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes.” - The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous (1975)
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