Artist overcomes disability to create prize-winning work

COLUMBIA — By the time he was 11, Jacolby Satterwhite had decided he wanted to be an artist.

Then he began getting a pain in his right shoulder that wouldn't go away. It was cancer.

Doctors removed shoulder muscle and bone, did bone grafts and inserted a metal rod. He went through 18 months of chemotherapy.

Although Satterwhite could move his hand, his arm and shoulder movement was restricted, which didn't bode well for an artist. But he picked up his right hand with his left hand, stuck a brush in it and went back to work. "I started drawing when the cast was still on," Satterwhite, now 21, said.

The persistence paid off; one of the former Eau Claire High School student's paintings just won a $20,000 prize. It came from VSA, formerly known as Very Special Arts, an organization for artists with disabilities.

Satterwhite's "Remission and Resilience" is being shown with other finalists at the Smithsonian Institution's S. Dillon Ripley Center in Washington.

Those who know Satterwhite say he's a good artist by any measure, not only among those with disabilities.

"He was never one to make excuses and was always willing to pay his own way," said Janice Johnson, who was his art teacher at Eau Claire. "Rarely do you find students at that age willing to put forward the commitment. He was focused and determined."

After two years at Eau Claire, Satterwhite was admitted to the Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, a residential school in Greenville.

"I'm looking at a relief print on my wall that he did — it's 24 by 36 inches. He was thinking on a different scale," said Joe Thompson, visual arts chairman at the Governor's School.

Satterwhite had been the art star at his school, but the Governor's School is filled with stars. Satterwhite said the program there "was very hardcore."

"He buckled down and worked through that first year," Thompson said. "Then he really caught on fire as a senior. We all were just crazy about him."

"Remission and Resilience" is 4 feet by 5 feet and has six figures in it doing hard-to-define tasks. They're placed in a setting that is somewhat realistic, but also rather abstract. Satterwhite, now a senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, draws on the art of the past, such as Baroque painting, as well as contemporary art.

As a child, he began drawing to help his mother, Patricia, who wanted to invent and market products. He eventually plans to create an art installation based on her drawings.

He and his father, Henry Satterwhite Jr., often went to the Columbia Museum of Art and City Art Gallery. Although teaching himself a new way to draw and paint was hard, Satterwhite said, family illnesses and adolescence prevented him from worrying about it too much.

And once he arrived at Eau Claire, he had plenty of support from Johnson.

"She's amazing," he said. "She saw my potential. She'd stay until 9 at night helping me. I owe her so much."

The admiration is mutual.

"I could go on and on about him," said Johnson, who has been teaching at Eau Claire for 13 years. She also helped Satterwhite get into the Governor's School in 2002, even though it meant losing a star student.

"There's no way you can hold a student down when you see that kind of potential," she said.

The VSA award comes at a good time, Satterwhite said. He just got laid off from his job and his grandmother died. "I found out in the middle of some unfortunate events," he said.