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Movers & Shakers: Charise Isis and "The Grace Project"



Calling Kingston home, Charise Isis is an artist who specializes in portrait, boudoir and pin-up photography. Her work challenges our culture's standards of beauty by allowing women of all different ages, body types, ethnicities and in varying transitional phases of life to be able to express courage, strength, sensuality, depth, individual and unique beauty.

Her work has been exhibitied widely both nationally and internationally in solo exhibits and public and private collections at galleries such as the Michael Mazzeo Gallery in New York City; The Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts; The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, the Photographers Network Collection in Seigen, Germany; the Center for Photography at Woodstock; and CPW’s Permanent Print Collection at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (New Paltz).

She is also the genius behind The Grace Project, a photographic exhibition series that aims to reveal the courage, beauty and grace of women who have had mastectomies for breast cancer.

To date, almost 400 women from all over the country have been photographed for the project with a goal of photographing 800 – the approximate number of women newly diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States each day. The portraits are exhibited throughout the U.S. on large-format silk banners and will eventually be put together in one space to show the enormous impact of the disease. The Grace project will later be a published as a book.

In addition, Charise Isis does speaking engagements, addressing breast cancer and body image by revealing some of the powerful stories of transformation that occur as a result of the photographs. 

Drawing inspiration from ancient Hellenistic marble and stone sculptures, Grace women are draped with luscious, vibrant fabric, reminiscent of great works such as Venus de Milo – a statue of whom Charise Isis admired as a child.

An empowering tool for women with breast cancer, their partners and families, The Grace Project brings the general public face-to-face with women who have dealt with breast cancer, increasing both awareness for breast health and acceptance of the post-mastectomy body.  

“There needs to be beauty attached to this because scars don’t make you less beautiful,” she says. “It sort of represents the declaration of life and the beauty of survival.”

For more information, log onto www.the-grace-project.org or their Facebook page. If you would like to be photographed for the project, email the artist.

 Music: http://www.bensound.com

This video feature originally appeared in the March/April 2018 Issue. Music: http://www.bensound.com
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