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| Dana Donaty's ‘Florida Blue, The Revenue Stream’ |
South Florida contemporary artist Dana Donaty explores illness, women’s health, historical erasure, and the systems that shape how women’s bodies are understood through a new punch needle work created during her time at the Chanorth Art Residency.
What does it mean to inhabit a body shaped by illness?
For artist Dana, that question has become the starting point for an ongoing investigation into the ways illness can transform not only the body, but also the experience of time, relationships, and belonging.
Florida Blue, The Revenue Stream, completed in 2026 during Dana’s time at the Chanorth Art Residency, is part of a new punch needle series exploring those questions through material, research, grief, rage, and memory.
Over the past decade, illness has changed far more than Dana’s body. It has altered how she experiences the world around her, prompting a deeper investigation into the history of women’s health, medicine, and the ways women have been understood—or misunderstood—within medical and social systems.
“I started there, but the research kept expanding,” Dana explains.
As she moved through those histories, she began to recognize that experiences that had initially felt deeply personal were also part of a much longer lineage of exclusion, dismissal, and erasure.
And, unexpectedly, that realization brought some comfort.
Doctors have often made it sound as though she is uniquely complicated rather than acknowledging the limits of medical knowledge and research.
“Different century. Same shit.”
What began as an attempt to make sense of her own experience has therefore become a broader investigation of the historical and systemic forces that shape how women’s bodies are understood, cared for, and remembered.
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| Dan Donaty's ‘Florida Blue, The Revenue Stream’ Side 2 |
Florida Blue, The Revenue Stream
Created in 2026, Florida Blue, The Revenue Stream combines acrylic yarn, Marino wool, Mongolian cashmere, pink mirrored plexiglass, twisted nylon mason line, grief, and rage.
The work unfolds across two sides.
Side 1 is grounded in the present, where illness can pull the body into systems that manage rather than care. Here, the river becomes a figure for the extractive flow of contemporary healthcare.
Side 2 turns toward the past, tracing a lineage from women persecuted for their healing practices to the institutions that continue to govern women’s health today.
Together, the two sides ask a larger question: How do the currents of history move through women’s bodies?
Through the language of fiber and the physical labor of punch needle, Dana brings together personal experience, historical research, material memory, and social critique. The resulting work becomes both an exploration of her own lived experience and an examination of the larger systems that have shaped women's relationships with medicine, authority, care, and the body.
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| Dana Donaty Studio |
A Continuing Investigation
Rather than offering a single conclusion, Florida Blue, The Revenue Stream forms part of Dana’s continuing investigation into women’s health and the historical structures surrounding it.
The work connects the intimate realities of illness with a broader cultural history, asking viewers to consider what is remembered, what is erased, who is believed, and what happens when institutions continue to govern bodies without fully understanding them.
Florida Blue, The Revenue Stream is currently included in A Pixel Ring, an online exhibition presented by Field Projects Gallery and curated by @herlovelyface, @jacobrhodes74, and Elizabeth Harris.
View the exhibition:
www.fieldprojectsgallery.com/a-pixel-ring
Florida Blue, The Revenue Stream, 2026
Acrylic yarn, grief, Marino wool, Mongolian cashmere, pink mirrored plexiglass, rage, twisted nylon mason line.
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| Dana Donaty's ‘Florida Blue, The Revenue Stream’ detail pic |
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