How often does this happen: You're listening to a news story describing some problem halfway around the world and you say to yourself, "I know how to fix that!" It's not your area of expertise. It's not a place you know. But you are sure that if you went there you could solve the problem.
Los Angeles artist Mary Beth Heffernan is the rare person who decided to actually give it a try. Last summer, Heffernan, who is also an art professor at Occidental College, became obsessed with Ebola ā particularly the images of the health care workers in those protective suits, or PPE as they're called for short.
"They looked completely menacing," says Heffernan. "I mean they really made people look almost like storm troopers. I imagined what would it be like to be a patient? To not see a person's face for days on end?"
And what really got Heffernan is that as far as she could tell, there was an easy fix.
"I found myself almost saying out loud: 'Why don't they put photos on the outside of the PPE? Why don't they just put photos on?'"
[For more of this story, written by Nurith Aizenman, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/goats...faceless-ebola-suits]
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