Zizi Raymond:

Zizi Raymond is a multifaceted artist using different mediums—collages, painting, and sculpturing. Her art has been in exhibitions at UCLA Hammer Museum and Cleveland center for Contemporary Art and is also found in collections at Berkeley Art Museum and UC Davis Art Museum.

Raymond found that her artistic expression was challenged when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a diagnosis she has faced twice. “In times of crisis I have a hard time making art…I make work out of what’s inside of me and I was too scared at that time to go into my studio and find out what was inside of me. So I stopped working.” When Raymond returned to creating art she produced a collage that deals with her cancer experience. Raymond collects medical books and is fascinated with images in the medical literature and incorporates them into her art. She claims that working on a collage is a process combining images and creating a third meaning. “I do whatever I do until I get a charge out of it.” Usually, that charge exists within the balance between elements that are scary and funny.

Scary and funny are also two faces of cancer—scary because of the seriousness of the illness and funny because of the many absurd situations that arise when a person is treated as a headless body in need of medical treatment and not as a co participant in the curing process. Raymond conveys these faces, the laughter and the fear, and we see why cancer is so charged with emotions. Raymond expressiveness is a channel to her unique experience of living with breast cancer. But when asked if her art leads to personal healing, she says: “[To me,] it’s not about healing, it’s about divulging.”