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 Artist, Author, Therapeutic Artist From Hollywood Executive To Using Art To Help The Terminally Ill. After graduating from NYU Film School, Barbara Marco's dream was to become a movie producer, little knowing that her real future would lead in a drastically different direction. Her career began Hollywood style - storyboarded to material perfection - handsome husband, money, meetings with megawatt stars - on a fast track. Soon she found herself VP of Creative Affairs, working for famed Hollywood film producer, Marty Bregman, overseeing the development of film classics like Scarface, meeting Al Pacino, Alan Alda, and numerous movie stars - a stressed out high power development executive in the glamorous fast paced movie business. She was also an avid runner - until one day she incurred a running injury which then developed into a bad back problem and sciatica and started her on a track which would prove to be life changing in a major way. She went to a chiropractor who prescribed a popular treatment of the 80s, hanging upside down in ankle boots. This made her back feel better, but it also caused an irritation to a tendon in her ankle. A shot of cortisone in the tendon brought relief, but, when she tried to hang again, suddenly she felt something "go". Her ankle turned purple, and she found that she could not walk without pain. Soon, she was limping every day in pain and going from doctor to doctor, but none of them seemed to know what had happened. Then things got worse. A herniated disc formed in her lower back, then a bulging disc in her neck. Finally, she found herself unable to walk, sit or stand without pain. She began drifting through what she describes as a kind of biomechanical nightmare into a land of chronic debilitating pain, frequent hopelessness, and a place where the normal activities of life were no longer possible. Giving birth to her son, while joyful, worsened her condition, and soon she found herself living a life of continual disability. Eventually, after being forced to leave her high-octane Hollywood job of 11 years, Barbara embarked on what she called "a healing journey", starting out with the most minimal of tools. She felt like she was using a toothpick as a walking stick to scale Mount Kilimanjaro. But something kept her going - mostly pain - a powerful motivator. Luckily, her system was so sensitive that she was unable to take pain killers, so she avoided the trap, common to those dealing with pain, of becoming addicted to drugs. She tried many forms of alternative treatments including ayurveda and acupuncture, Chinese and Tibetan medicine, Jungian based psychoanalysis, and bodywork of all types leading her to a spiritual journey into metaphysics, meditation, energy work, psychics, and healers. And, remembering a line that John Barrymore spoke in the classic film "Twentieth Century" - "The sorrows of life are the joys of art", she rediscovered her interest and talent in photography, a step which would prove to have profound consequences. She began to explore "photo collage" - using a hybrid of photos and text, and these collages eventually became a kind of storyboard through which Marco explored the question: "Why is this happening to me?" This personal exploration, using her artistic and photographic skill, led to her creating powerful works of art dealing with healing, works which she was pleased to find were so well received that several galleries chose to give her art a showing. Ms. Magazine featured her work in a six-page spread entitled "Splices of Life". When the physical labor of darkroom work eventually proved too difficult, Marco joined the digital age discovering new powerful tools using Adobe Photoshop to continue to create her images. Heartened by this reception to her art, Marco rededicated herself to the healing of her body. She underwent a surgery to fuse her spine and several years later another surgery to repair her ankle tendon. While undergoing these challenges, she authored her first book about the healing process, Stumbling Toward Enlightenment, An Illustrated Crisis Companion. It drew rave reviews. Publishers Weekly said, "Barbara Lewis Marco's ironic yet gentle one-panel comics blend lovely, archaic, Monty Python-esque graphics with clever one-liners that take the wind out of darker sails." Dr. Bernie Siegel said, "clever and witty. A nice gift for those in crisis situations". The physical pain continued. And, her long marriage ended in divorce. But slowly, through a combination of western medicine and alternative therapies, her health began to improve, and eventually Marco found herself mobile again. And becoming healthy. Her next book, inspired by her own sometimes terrifying and labyrinthine journey back to health, was The Little Book of Courage: An Illustrated Guide to Challenging Our Fears. For this book Barbara created 67 images, incorporating 19th century engravings, that are at once clever and whimsical accompanied by humorous and insightful text to help the reader to explore various aspects of fear and how we develop the courage to deal with fear. Barbara's confrontation with pain and injury has led her to believe that there is no set formula for healing - you have to seek your own recipe - but she did find that in her own healing, the expressive power of creativity was the one thing she relied on. She says that art alone did not heal her. But it often helped keep her distracted from the pain, and, most vitally, it returned to her a sense of control and faith in herself. That, Barbara decided, is what she wants to give to others. Looking for ways to accomplish this, Marco discovered the emerging field of artists working in medicine - helping others who are sick, and frequently terminal, tell their own stories - raw, frequently dark, real stories that explore the anxieties of sickness, with no redemption and no guarantee of healing in the third act, and helping bring the power of art to bear on their most challenging days. After a decade in Hollywood, Marco found a new truth - stranger than fiction - and far more redemptive - and a new life's work. A friend connected her with The Creative Center, Arts for People with Cancer, and they offered Marco an "artist-in-residency" at NYU Hospital working with Palliative Care and Intensive Care Unit patients. Excited by the potential for creativity in a medical environment, Marco accepted and stayed for 4 years, helping patients to be creative in a variety of ways and to commit their fears to canvas, defying the difficulty of their circumstances. Much as she herself had done. At the Creative Center, she also taught collage workshops and she continues teaching art bedside to hospital patients who are critically ill and teaching other artists to bring their talents to medical environments. At the Center, Marco recalls this seminal moment: "I was giving a collage workshop. Somewhere in the middle of it, a woman raised her hand and asked if she could take her wig off. And I realized from my own experience with suffering: These people are having the absolute worst time of their lives - but still there is a need to be honest. To cast off the images, the wigs, the appearances and deal with what really matters." She developed a rapport with one ICU patient in particular: Stacey Nebenzahl, quadriplegic. Minus limbs, Nebenzahl verbally directed Marco in the construction of her brand of darkly funny art. One such work, "Stacy's Getaway" portrayed her escape from the hospital in the back of an ambulance - unabashedly swinging at doctors and nurses with a baseball bat. Eventually Nebenzahl lost her voice too, but their working relationship continued. Marco read her lips. Today Barbara is Artist-In-Residence at Jacob Perlow Hospice at Beth Israel Medical Center working with patients and families in the last weeks or days of life. She gives art workshops to nurses, hospice staff and bereavement groups. She supervises and works in two weekly programs at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital called "Wilma's Studio", envisioned by Dr. Wilma Bulkin Siegel, a retired oncologist and artist. It is part of the Arts in Medicine Project of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, and brings artists to work in the Pediatric Oncology and Hematology Clinic, and the Pediatric Neurology Clinic for low income families. She is also on the seminar faculty at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and is now in her fourth year of teaching medical students as part of The Arts in Medicine Project of their Program In Narrative Medicine. Barbara Marco's battle with pain led her to look at fear and at courage in a deeper way than most people experience. When you are disabled and all of your external power is taken away and the structure of your world falls apart, where is your strength in the world? What is your worth? Whether physically ill or psychologically ill, the questions are the same. Your foundation has been shaken and you are looking to find solace, meaning, and a new path to walk on toward health and healing. When all your ideas and beliefs about how life was "supposed" to be get dissolved, your fears come to visit and decide to hang around. When this happened to Marco she had to pull back the veil and find out what they were about, and how they were interfering with the energy she needed for healing. She began to connect with deeper, less conscious parts of herself and looked at whether these fears were "real" or fears she was taught or programmed to believe. She had to build a new inner strength - which she thinks we all have. Suddenly she was no longer so dependent on what was happening on the outside - the things you cannot control - and she believes this inner strength is the place where the power really is. Barbara Marco's journey has led her from the business of art in the entertainment industry to the power of art to confront fear, bring solace, and perhaps provide meaning for terminally ill people. Art, Barbara believes, is the language of the soul. "You don't have to invent new words to speak the language - just combine elements in new, personal, revelatory ways. A mother dying of breast cancer might create a treasure box for her children to remember her by. Or tell the story of her disease in image and text. Or dress her hospital window in vibrant hues. This is the thing about hospital artistry: creativity is usually the first thing that we sacrifice in the face of overwhelming problems, but it can also be a saving grace - allowing us to work through these problems with greater clarity, resolve, courage and humor. Especially humor." top of page |
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 This website and all content copyright 2004 Barbara Lewis Marco Site Design: Canfield Design Studios, Inc. |
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