Diagnosed With Multiple Sclerosis, An Artist Turns Her MRIs Into Art

                                                                  

In the 1970s and ’80s, Elizabeth Jameson was a civil rights lawyer, first defending children with chronic illness and disabilities, then fighting for gender equality. She worked in the prison system and in the White House on health policy alongside then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. In the late ’80s, she was playing with her kids on a local playground when she suddenly found that she couldn’t speak; later, she learned the cause was a lesion in a part of her brain called Broca’s area.

Jameson regained her ability to speak through intense therapy, but in 1991 was diagnosed with a progressive form of multiple sclerosis. No longer able to practice law, she went to art school for painting and found she had a talent for it. Today, she’s known for her silk paintings and copper etching prints that are derived from a very personal source: her own MRI scans.

“I decided I needed to give back to my community,” she says—and her new community was people who were also dealing with neurological disabilities. “I was a public interest lawyer, so I decided to become a public interest artist, whatever the hell that would mean.”

READ More of Elizabeth’s story and see a slide show of varying MRI images and art… 

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