This month, I came across the most refreshing article written by Caroline Newman and featured in UVA Today’s Art & Culture section about one of the longest living cystic fibrosis survivors.
That’s right. Art & Culture, not Health & Medicine. Because cystic fibrosis warrior Luanne Mckinnon is also a renowned art scholar who earned her Ph.D in Art History from the University of Virgina this past May. And at age 60, she is absolutely beautiful inside and out.
McKinnon was diagnosed in the winter of 1969-1970 at the age of 14, when the median life expectancy for someone with CF was… 14.
By 19, McKinnon was studying abroad in Europe, taking her bulky nebulizer with her through the Netherlands, France, Italy and Greece. McKinnon’s zest for life and search for beauty in the world has stuck with her 40 years later.
“I think that there is a relationship between trauma and the desire for beauty,” [McKinnon] said. “The uniqueness of creative humans just seemed to be what I needed to think about, what I needed to look at and to understand.”
Since her Europe trip, McKinnon earned a Master of Fine Arts in Painting at Texas Christian University, eventually opening McKinnon Modern in NY where she bought and sold post WWII art. By 1990 she moved to Charlottesville, VA to persue her Ph.D and became the protégée of the late Pablo Picasso scholar Lydia Gasman.
Of course there were CF hiccups along the way, and it is clear that McKinnon became close with the UVA Medical Center staff. By 2001, McKinnon married fellow artist Daniel Reeves and moved to Scotland to lecture on Picasso. Upon her return to the U.S. she served as director at two art museums until her health declined in 2010.
At 56, she recieved a double-lung transplant and spent two years in exhausting recovery.
Two years later, she finished her Ph.D dissertation on a work of art created during wartime. As Newman points out, how appropriate it seems that McKinnon would choose to write about beauty in a time of such struggle? It runs so congruent to her approach to life: to find beauty in the face of adversity.
Read the whole article here.
Luanne’s attitude has had a clear, profound effect on those around her. Does she inspire you?
This month, PatientWorthy is teaming up with CysticLife.org to spread awareness of CF and support their collaboration with the Mayo Clinic for a community-driven research project investigating the benefits of exercise for CF patients. If you’re interested in contributing to the fund or want to become a CysticLife member, drop by CysticLife.org or donate here today! Don’t forget to share this post!
