The Appendix Cancer PMP Research Foundation invited artists from all disciplines and skill levels to participate in the 2nd Annual Shades of Amber: Creative Contest for a Cure, a national virtual art contest in honor of Giving Tuesday!
Featuring original artwork inspired by the color amber, the official color of appendix cancer awareness, symbolizing hope, strength, and awareness for those affected by appendix cancer.
WINNERS:
1ST PLACE: Juliana Divita (11 years old), Amber Sunset, Colored Pencils and Marker, 2025
2ND PLACE: Christine Bettcher, Love, Light & Hope for Beth, Photography, 2025
3RD PLACE: Lindsay Barad, Amber Through The Aspens, Watercolor, 2025
Key Details
- Submission Deadline: DEADLINE PASSED
- Voting Fee: $5 or more donation
- Voting Period: November 11 – December 2, 2025, at 5 PM ET VOTING NOW CLOSED
- Winners Announced: Giving Tuesday, December 2, 2025 (on social media)
Thanks to your generosity and the $15,000 matching donation from an anonymous donor, we surpassed our $30,000 Giving Tuesday goal and raised $36,260, with donations still coming in!
Your support is helping us fund critical research, educate and empower families, and raise awareness about appendix cancer. From all of us at ACPMP, thank you. Your kindness and commitment make all the difference.
- Voting now closed. Miss the deadline? You can still help by donating directly to support our mission. Donations of $50+ will receive a copy of the 2026 calendar, featuring artwork from the 2024 contest!
Prizes & Recognition
- 1st Place: $300 VISA Gift Card
- 2nd Place: $200 VISA Gift Card
- 3rd Place: $100 VISA Gift Card
- Recognition across ACPMP’s website, social media, and newsletter
- New this Year: Your Art Featured in our Calendar!
- The top 12 entries from the 2025 contest will also be featured in ACPMP’s 2027 Shades of Amber calendar, distributed nationally as a donor premium and awareness piece. Your artwork will inspire hope and spread awareness all year long. (The 2026 calendar will feature art from the 2024 Shades of Amber contest).
Meet the Artists
Behind Every Artwork, a Story
Shades of Amber celebrates creativity and community while raising awareness for appendix cancer and PMP. Below, you can explore each artist’s work in its full format and read the statements that inspired it.
Zihua (Zackery) Yao, 爱 癌 ài, ái (Love, Cancer), Inkjet Print on X-ray Film, 2024
“爱，癌 ài, ái(Love, Cancer)” intertwines the silent battles against cancer with the cultural silence imposed by 面子 (miànzi – “face”). This installation re-contextualizes family archives and medical film photography against urban decay, merging images of internal and environmental neglect. Inspired by the artist’s mother’s fight with breast cancer, the work engages Asian Feminism to critique the undervaluation of women’s health. This journey of self-healing challenges the norms of silence and resilience and advocates for a discourse on health, gender, and environmental consciousness. This project is a tribute to enduring strength and a call to break the silence. Overall, it’s about love.
Wendy McReynolds, Digesting Hope, Collage and digital photo, 2025
My brother-in-law, Scott, lost his older brother in May of 2025 to cancer discovered after his appendix burst. He was a key figure in Scott’s life. I never knew Scott’s brother, but in the bleakest moments, his brother never lost hope. Often, I would hear about the circumstances and try to ingest the hopeful spirit of Scott’s brother. I digested it, prayed, and thought about Scott: how difficult it must have been for him. The trees embrace one another and grow together, connected by a colon and an appendix.
Steve Beckwith, Amber Sunrise Splash, Photography, 2013
Early morning sunrise splash caught at Fort Williams Park, Cape Elizabeth, ME, with Ram Island Ledge Light in the background.
Stephanie Bruce, Amber Comfort, Cotton fabrics, 2025
Sewing has always been therapy for me. Whether it’s hemming pants, mending a torn pocket or creating a beautiful quilt or Halloween costume, I love the process the same. I sewed a lot while recovering from surgery in February 2025 while waiting for 2 different oncologists and 3 different pathologists to come To my final diagnosis.
Kaylia Jones, Voice, Digital Art, 2025
Nicolien Jorritsma, Hope, strength & awareness Tree, Acrylic, 2025
I always chose to do what I was good at. Never really creative, so I stayed away from it. And now I understand better how creativity works. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be an artist. In fact, coloring outside the lines is perfectly fine, and the motto is and remains: as long as it’s fun to do. And so there are my pieces of art. Not perfect, but made to give hope and strength to all and create awareness. And because I think the contest is a nice way to add some donations for ACPMP.
The trees are simple. But in complicated times, simple is sometimes exactly what you’re looking for. The colors are shades of amber, which also represent autumn, the season we’re in now in the Netherlands, where I live as the wife of my brave husband, who was diagnosed with appendiceal cancer on July 4.
Hope, as in a tree that, after shedding its leaves in autumn, grows new ones in spring.
Strength, as in the sturdy trunk and roots that make the tree powerful. And awareness, because I chose to participate, something that many people don’t know about me and wouldn’t expect. And with this, I can create awareness in my network.
Best regards,
Nicolien
Nicolien Jorritsma, Amber Tree, Alcohol markers & Fineliners, 2025
Manuela Marston, Sign of hope in burst of light, Photography, 2025
Lindy Blosser, I Know You Are Weary, Soft pastel, 2025
This piece was meant to capture the concept of weariness. A warm color palette gives a sense of comfort for this exhausted soul as she is enveloped by a glowing veil. The veil and the light symbolize hope.
Veronica Bini, Lantern of Hope, Glass & Metal, 2023
My work in stained glass has helped me get through many tough days while battling appendix cancer. Even while going through chemotherapy and my hands shaking and weak, it kept me looking forward to what I could do, instead of thinking what I couldn’t do during treatment.
Veronica Bini, Amber agate lantern, Glass & Metal, 2024 (below)
Kathy Guzzo, Hopes Inner Beauty, Photography, 2024
When I look deep inside this tulip, it reminds me that even in the midst of cancer, there’s always beauty and hope, if we take time to look deep inside.
Hetal Anjaria, Let’s Be Friends, Watercolor, 2025
I am a mixed media artist. I like to create artworks in different styles. I am posting two artworks that are very close to me. I paint a lot of folk art, traditional, and contemporary styles. I love nature and am inspired by the nature that surrounds me.
Hetal Anjaria, Folk Art, Watercolor, 2025 (below)
Andy Harris, Limbs I, Mixed Media Collage, 2025
Andy Harris is a collage artist whose practice centers on the painted paper—each piece a result of an evolving balance between control and spontaneity. Employing a variety of tools and materials, Harris creates richly layered surfaces where intentional marks meet the unpredictability of chance. His process begins long before final compositions take shape, rooted in the tactile, exploratory work of painting papers and drawing in small books. These sketchbooks serve as both laboratory and archive, where ideas are tested, discarded, and rediscovered.
Harris collects his painted papers with equal parts purpose and openness. Some are made with a clear vision in mind; others remain untouched for months or years, waiting for the right context to emerge. The resulting collage works blur the boundaries between observation and abstraction, drawing on imagery from still life, daily rituals, urban debris, and the non-representational language of abstract expressionism. Through this approach, Harris constructs visual spaces that feel at once familiar and fractured—compositions that invite viewers into a dialogue between form, material, and meaning.
“Collage, for me, begins with the process of painting paper—layering color, using different tools, working with both intention and chance. I draw and collage in small books as a daily practice. These books are where things begin, where ideas take shape, overlap, and transform. My finished works are built from this layered practice: part observation, part memory, part abstraction.”
Andy Harris, Limbs IV, Mixed Media Collage, 2025 (below)
Hannahlaine Harris, Peace Through Chaos, Linocut and Ink, 2025
I primarily work with stoneware, combining wheel-throwing with occasional hand-building to create pieces that balance structure with organic patterns. The surfaces of my ceramics often incorporate layered glazes and carved textures. These processes enable me to utilize the beauty of throwing on the wheel, as well as add textures, patterns, and variation to each piece. I create functional and sculptural pieces that emphasize form and texture. My art both invites others to understand the order within texture and mark-making.
My ceramics are characterized by order, repetition, and pattern. For example, I have made a group of ceramic vases that have repetition of simple lines that create a sense of order in my life. Pipin Drysdale inspires me in this, as we share similar mark-making styles. I’m drawn towards repetition and symmetry. This gives me a sense of peace in this world of chaos while satisfying my need for order. I often use symbols such as lines and organic shapes that fit together like a puzzle. This is because of my desire in my life for precision and balance, echoing the influence of my OCD in shaping my artistic choices.
I start on the wheel, and once I have the shape I want, I go back and use hand-building techniques to carve and texture the clay. I am inspired by textile art with the use of simple lines and shapes to achieve expressions through repetition and order. After the clay is fired once, I glaze each piece. I typically use solid colors that have variation. Once the work is fired, the most rewarding part happens: you get to open the kiln and see the finished work.
My approach is to create objects that bring a sense of stability. Whether large or small, I want my work to reflect both peace and order.
Charisse Foo, What the Future Holds, Digital Illustration, 2025
Illness is a foreign land. We camp out with our supplies and build a shelter in the heart of the great unknown. In moments of stillness, we look out to dreams or regrets, or deep into a changing landscape of both fears and hopes. There is beauty in this moment, before the future.
Eileen Farao, I Held Myself Like a Question Mark, Acrylic, 2025
This painting was created five months after my CRS and HIPEC surgery, and just days after a brief hospitalization for a bowel obstruction — a reminder that healing is rarely linear, but often layered with unexpected turns, in the midst of recovery.
“I Held My Body Like a Question” reflects the duality of survivorship: the uncertainty that lingers, and the gratitude that grows. The central figure holds the spirometer like a sacred object – each breath to be measured, each inhale a quiet act of hope. She is surrounded by symbols of wisdom, intervention, and transformation — an owl at her feet, medical professionals floating above, a warrior in her corner watching over her, the halo of a surgical scissors slicing through the overexamined parts of us, and the puppet-like strings of IV bags, drainage and NG tubes that speak to the tension between what is within our control and what we must surrender to while also indicating the profound sense of connection that this experience evokes.
My diagnosis in April 2025 disrupted a planned Foreign Service assignment in Rio de Janeiro and rerouted my life to the DC metro area. But I remain deeply thankful — for the constellation of events that led to early detection, for the medical team that guided me through treatment, and for the family, friends, and fellow survivors who continue to walk beside me.
With a background in data analysis and conflict resolution, I now return to storytelling in my recovery — through illustration, improv, and collaborative research. This piece is part of a larger intention to center patient voices in the conversation around appendix cancer, exploring earlier detection, illuminating the realities of postoperative life, and celebrating the creativity and strength that all survivors carry.
This painting is not just about questions. It’s about breath. About presence. About the quiet joy of imagining a future — and the power of art to help describe this extraordinary experience.
1ST PLACE WINNER: Juliana Divita (11 years old), Amber Sunset, Colored Pencils and Marker, 2025
My name is Juliana, and I dedicate my drawing to my Aunt Beth, who has PMP cancer. I am 11 years old and in the 6th grade.
Devon Lawrence, From Fire, I Rise, Watercolor, 2025
2ND PLACE WINNER: Christine Bettcher, Love, Light & Hope for Beth, Photography, 2025
As I took this beautiful photo, my heart was full of love, light, hope, support, and encouragement for my dear sister-in-law, Beth, as she takes each step on her journey through the challenges of ACPMP. Sending prayers for Beth’s comfort, strength & resilience, for my brother Jimmy, and for my darling 2-year-old sweet nephew, Max, who adores his Mommy! Praying for all who are facing similar challenges, and for those who love, serve, support, and care for them. Thank you, ACPMP Research Foundation, for your dedication, service, and research to support patients and find a cure!
Julia Barbour, Untitled in Amber, Acrylic and Acrylic Ink, 2024
Julia Barbour, A Walk Through Amber, Photography and Digital Collage, 2025 (below)
3RD PLACE WINNER: Lindsay Barad, Amber Through The Aspens, Watercolor, 2025
Inspired by the stunning aspen trees in the Colorado mountains turning to gold, Amber Through the Aspens reflects the beauty of change. After facing appendix cancer, I found comfort in nature’s reminder that change can be radiant. To me, amber represents resilience, warmth, and strength.
Nancy Alpert, Mandala of Protection, Pen and Watercolor, 2025
I went through an Appendiceal Cancer diagnosis and treatment in 2022. I hope my art provides support for others on this journey. It felt good to incorporate the ACPMP logo in my work to honor the contributions of this excellent organization. The images are available as black and white prints that can be used as templates to color, paint or meditate on. I’m happy to send them to anyone who asks..
Nancy Alpert, Shield Us, Cure Us, Pen and Watercolor, 2025 (below)
Aleksandra Agata Berezowska, Amber Haze, Photography,2025
This photo was taken after an incredibly strenuous hike. The effort was rewarded with a stunning sunset and mountains shrouded in amber haze—a moment of serenity and hope.
