Since 1975 the Chicago artist Hollis Sigler created psychologically complex narrative paintings, drawings, and prints grounded in personal experience. Adopting a faux naif style, the childlike look of her art was characterized by Sigler as a reaction against what she saw as a patriarchal culture that historically treated women as little more than children. And yet, from its inception, this style was also a means of conveying difficult emotional content in a way that viewers could easily understand.

Born in Gary, Indiana, Sigler earned a B.F.A. degree from Moore College of Art. Three years later, she received an M.F.A. degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began to take her place in Chicago's art scene during a period when artists in that city, as well as in Los Angeles and San Francisco, were questioning New York's cultural hegemony. Familiar with Chicago's Hairy Who group-with its emphasis on cartoons and other low-art imagery-as well as the whimsical art of Florine Stettheimer, Sigler found sympathetic and quirky precedents for her own burgeoning, idiosyncratic approach. In 2001 Sigler succumbed to her long battle with cancer which had been the topic of much of her work.