(Illustration by Geoff Decrucq)
Martha Hollingsworth Hanlon was born August 14, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama, and lived in Panama, Turkey, and France as well as the United States. She had a life-long love of the arts and education, both as an artist and as a French teacher. She studied French at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, and studied art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France and at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, Alabama. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in fine arts from Columbia College, Chicago, and her Master of Associated Medical Sciences degree, specializing in biomedical visualization, from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
She worked as an agent for TWA and BOAC airlines in Paris and for Air France in Bordeaux, France; as founder and director of the Centre d'Expression Plastique, Sainte Helene, Medoc, France; as an art instructor at the Centre Culturel du Carmes, Langon, France; as director of Parkart, a community arts organization, and as a courtroom news sketch artist for WBRC-TV in Birmingham, Alabama; as a graphic designer at Creations Graphiques in Paris, France; as an anaplastologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas; and as a French teacher at the Alliance Francaise de Chicago, at the College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn and to numerous private students.
She was an advocate of art in basic education and participated in numerous community arts and education activities. She initiated, wrote and directed an Illinois Arts Council Artist-in-Residence grant at Forest Glen Elementary School in Glen Ellyn. Her art has been exhibited at the Salon d'Artistes d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux and Galerie Contour, Paris; in the permanent collection of the Jazz Hall of Fame in Birmingham, Alabama; at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Chicago State University, Vignette Gallery, the Newberry Library, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Woman Made Gallery, Chicago.
Her art works include a large number of portraits, numerous sculptures, murals, trompe l'oeil paintings, and art objects with which she decorated her home, the three series "Birds and Bees", "Red and Yellow, Black and White", and "Merging and Emerging" which she exhibited separately and collectively at various galleries in the Chicago area, and numerous medical illustrations, teaching aides, and prostheses. She performed copy work at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Louvre in Paris, and conducted art workshops at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and elsewhere.
She was a member of Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, of the Chicago Artist's Coalition, the National Woman's Caucus for Art, the American Anaplastology Association, the Association of Medical Illustrators, of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Indian Economic Development Association, and the Geneva Road Baptist Church, Wheaton, where she was a member of the choir.
She is survived by her husband, James E. Hanlon of Glen Ellyn; her children, Charles G. Decrucq of Oak Park, Illinois, Geoffroy A. Decrucq of Portland, Oregon, and Thomas E. Hanlon of Glen Ellyn; her mother Margaret Gore Hollingsworth of Albuquerque, New Mexico; her sister Margaret (Richard L.) Hollingsworth-Folks of Albuquerque; and her brother John A. G. (Melinda) Hollingsworth of Birmingham, Alabama.
She was preceded in death by her father, John E. Hollingsworth III and her brother, Wesley E. Hollingsworth.
Memorial funds have been established at the American Brain Tumor Association, 2720 River Road, Des Plaines, IL 60018 and the Geneva Road Baptist Church, 602 East Geneva Road, Wheaton, IL 60187.