Title: The Pink Gene

48 by 48 inches

Digital Cardboard Photos on Wooden Panel

The Pink Gene is a portrait installation that explores the intersection of gender, chronic illness, and medical bias. It brings together one hundred passport style portraits of women living with autoimmune disease, arranged in a grid that reflects both medical documentation and scientific research. Rather than highlighting individual identities, the work asks viewers to consider the collective weight of shared experience.

The portraits are divided into two groups. Black and white portraits represent women diagnosed with autoimmune disease. Portraits tinted pink represent women who, before receiving an accurate diagnosis, were told their symptoms were anxiety, stress, or psychosomatic. Pink becomes more than a color. It is a symbol of the ways women have historically been dismissed, misunderstood, and disbelieved within healthcare. One of the most meaningful parts of this project is that these women are strangers. They did not grow up together, belong to the same support group, or know one another before participating. They found this project through random social media connections and chose to trust a stranger with their photograph and, often, their story. 

They come from different countries, cultures, races, professions, ages, and backgrounds. The only thing connecting them is autoimmune disease and, for many, the experience of having their symptoms dismissed before receiving appropriate medical care. That matters. When women who have never met, who have nothing else in common, continue to tell the same story, it stops looking like coincidence. It begins to reveal a pattern. By removing names, biographies, and personal narratives, the installation shifts the focus away from individual stories and toward the larger system that connects them.

 Each portrait is intentionally simple. Together, they become something much larger than one person's experience. Viewed individually, these are portraits of strangers. Viewed together, they become evidence. The Pink Gene Project is not about offering answers. It is about making visible what has too often remained invisible. It asks who is believed, whose pain is considered credible, and what happens when hundreds of unrelated women tell remarkably similar stories. The installation transforms isolation into solidarity and private experiences into a public record, inviting viewers to see that behind every face is not only a person, but a pattern that can no longer be ignored.