{"id":32451,"date":"2025-11-12T23:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T23:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/32451\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T23:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T23:11:08","slug":"doctors-told-this-philly-artist-he-had-a-month-to-live-hes-lived-20-years-and-credits-arts-healing-powers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/32451\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctors told this Philly artist he had a month to live. He’s lived 20 years and credits art’s healing powers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty years ago,\u00a0Philadelphia artist Terrence Gore<\/a> was told he had just one month to live. Now he has a first-of-its-kind exhibit that shows the healing powers of art and nature.<\/p>\n

Gore has had a lifelong love affair with Bartram’s Garden<\/a>. The public garden in Southwest Philly is now the place he finds inspiration for his art, which is now on display inside the historic Bartram House.<\/p>\n

“As a child, I always yearned to come into this house, but it was not accessible,” Gore said.<\/p>\n

He grew up next door at Bartram Village, a public housing project that became his playground.<\/p>\n

“I saw this place as my own space, like I was the richest person,” Gore said.<\/p>\n

Nature gives him the strength to live with brain lesions and partial paralysis on his right side, complications from HIV and AIDS.<\/p>\n

Gore learned how to paint left-handed, even though he was right-handed.<\/p>\n

“This diagnosis is really, really a monster,” Gore said.<\/p>\n

But he finds art in nature quiets that monster. He doesn’t just paint: In Gore’s works, he incorporates material he finds in the garden, like branches, grass and seeds.<\/p>\n

The show is titled “Back to my Roots,” a reference to Gore’s past and his use of material from right off the ground.<\/p>\n

One piece called “We Stick Together” shows a family made from pieces of bark.<\/p>\n

\"med-bartrams-garden-artist-raw-concatenated-132040-frame-53810.jpg<\/p>\n

A piece titled “We Stick Together” is made of tree bark.<\/p>\n

Gore says art has helped him endure the medical hardships.<\/p>\n

“Every time I felt myself sinking, I start creating something, and it builds this new energy in me,” Gore said. “And it’s just like, ‘wow, look at that.’ Somehow, I forget all about that stage of depression.”<\/p>\n

Dr. Brian Litt, Gore’s neurologist at Penn Medicine, said nature and art can be therapeutic.<\/p>\n

“He has a challenging regimen,” Litt said. “There is this element of therapy, his own therapy, by his intellectual and artistic expression.”<\/p>\n

For Gore, the art show at Bartram is a dream come true. He said someday he’d like to teach art therapy because he knows how healing it can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty years ago,\u00a0Philadelphia artist Terrence Gore was told he had just one month to live. Now he has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32452,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[20438,69,71,70,2653],"class_list":["post-32451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-hiv-aids","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-southwest-philadelphia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}