Letting Go?
Founder Reflection · August 2026
Sometimes the things we create to carry us through a difficult moment eventually have to leave us.
Recently, four paintings that mean a great deal to me found new homes. I knew that was part of their purpose. What I did not anticipate was how difficult letting them go would feel.
Four deeply personal paintings left the Foundation's collection and began new chapters. I am grateful, sad, happy, all at once.
I understood why the paintings were there. I had not prepared myself for how it would feel when they actually left. Letting go now completes the art.
What once helped me navigate difficult emotions can now help support someone else through the creation of more art.
A Different Kind of Departure
I knew the paintings were meant to leave. I did not know how it would feel when they did.
First was Heart in Color, auctioned during our presentation at Winthrop Center.
I knew someone might acquire it. That was why I brought it there. Still, when the painting was actually gone, I was surprised by the feeling that followed. I was driving home without the object of my expression.
Heart in Color has always felt like one of my most expressive pieces. Watching it leave was, for a moment, genuinely heartbreaking.
Then, at the conclusion of our time at Winthrop, the other three paintings I had brought with me also found new homes: The Weight of Heaven, I Will Always Be There, and Where the Light Breaks.
The Conversation Behind the Art
Cancer changes what we understand about one another.
One of the donors who acquired the paintings was a very gracious supporter of the Mabazza Foundation.
We sat down together and talked.
He had also lost someone to pancreatic cancer.
There is an understanding that can sometimes exist between people whose lives have been touched by the same disease, even when our experiences are different.
We talked about my journey. We talked about surgery, fear and recovery. We talked about healthcare and its enormous cost. We talked about what serious illness asks of the person going through it and of the people standing beside them.
Mostly, we talked as two people whose lives had been changed by cancer.
Somewhere in that conversation, the paintings became more than objects changing ownership.
I Will Always Be There · A promise created in the shadow of uncertainty.
The Hardest One
Some paintings hold more than pigment.
Of the works that left, I Will Always Be There may have been the hardest for me to release.
That painting came from one of the most frightening periods of my illness. There was a time when I genuinely believed that I might be dying.
My thoughts were not only about what was happening to me. I was thinking about the people I might leave behind and trying, in whatever ways I could, to make certain they would be taken care of.
Including my dog.
She is a person too.
What the Painting Held
I was not simply letting go of a painting.
I was organizing things, thinking ahead, worrying about everyone else, and trying to leave some kind of protection behind in case I could no longer physically be there.
I Will Always Be There came from that place.
So when someone else carried it away, I realized that I was releasing something that contained a very particular version of me.
A frightened version.
A hopeful version.
A version of myself trying to make peace with something I could not control.
The Purpose of the Work
Perhaps the art was always supposed to move through me, not remain with me.
Giving emotion somewhere to go
The artwork began as a way to express feelings I could not always explain in words.
Allowing the work to leave
Creating the paintings helped me release emotion. Letting the paintings themselves go became another kind of release.
Turning expression outward
When artwork supports the Foundation, something that once helped me can become part of helping someone else.
“ Perhaps letting go is not losing the work.
Perhaps it is completing it.
What Good Would the Art Do If I Kept All of It?
The work had already helped me. Then I realized it could have a second purpose.
I began creating many of these images because I needed somewhere to put the things happening inside my head: fear, confusion, love, isolation, hope, and the strange emotional landscape that can accompany serious illness.
Sometimes I could express something visually that I could not quite explain in words.
It helped me.
Somewhere along the way, I realized it could have another purpose.
It could help someone else.
If something created during one of the hardest periods of my life can now help generate resources for someone facing a difficult period of their own, then perhaps letting it go is not the loss I initially felt.
Perhaps that is where the work becomes complete.
Works Moving Forward
The paintings leave the room. Their stories do not.
The Contradiction
I created something to let an emotion go, then became attached to the thing I created to release it.
I do not know whether other artists experience this. I suspect many do.
When something comes from an intensely personal place, there is a moment when you look at it and ask yourself:
Should I really let this go?
My former therapist once encouraged me to document what was happening in my head. Write it. Draw it. Give it a visual form. Find some way to place the feeling somewhere outside of myself.
The paintings became part of that process.
Apparently, this blog is part of it too.
This is me writing about the feeling of letting go of the things I created to help myself let go.
I realize that sentence is slightly circular.
But I think that may be exactly the point.
Moving Forward
Letting go creates room.
A few hours after the paintings left, the sadness had already begun to change.
I started thinking less about what was no longer in my possession and more about where the paintings were going.
Someone saw something in them.
Someone connected with them.
Someone believed they were worth carrying into the next part of their own story.
And because of that, the Mabazza Foundation has more ability to continue its work.
That changes everything.
The Foundation grew from the idea that something deeply personal could become something useful to somebody else. Art helped me navigate my own emotional landscape. When that art leaves me, it can help us create new opportunities to support people moving through difficult chapters of theirs.
That is not really an ending.
It is a handoff.
Carrying the Work Forward
It does not erase where something came from. It allows it to go somewhere next.
I am deeply grateful to everyone who purchased artwork, participated in the auction, made a donation, or simply stopped long enough to have a conversation with me.
And to the people now living with these paintings: I hope you enjoy them. I hope you care for them. Most of all, I hope that somewhere within the color, texture, struggle and light, you find something that belongs to your own story too.
As for me, letting these pieces go gives me room to create more.
More art. More expression. More opportunities to turn something difficult into something useful.
And hopefully, more ways for the Mabazza Foundation to help someone navigating the kind of emotional terrain that once seemed impossible for me to put into words.
Maybe that is what letting go is supposed to do.
It does not erase where something came from. It allows it to go somewhere next.
And perhaps, in its own way, that is how we move forward too.
With gratitude,
Uchenna Obinabo-Mabazza
Founder, Mabazza Foundation
Art · Survivorship · Community
Thank you for helping the art continue its journey.
Your support allows personal expression to become something larger: a way of helping another person through their own difficult moment.