A few months after Joan Tysinger was born in 1950, she contracted polio. It paralyzed both arms and one leg and left her with spinal scoliosis, which stunted her stature.
Doctors predicted she would never walk and would not live past her mid-20s.
They didn’t factor in her strength of will and perseverance.
She learned to walk, if somewhat precariously, with a leg brace and special shoes. She went on to live pretty much on her own and to earn a living.
As longtime friend Bruce Griffith of Blue Ridge, Ga., put it, “Joan just barreled her way through her limitations.”
She won respect as an artist and wide admiration as a teacher. Plus, she lived a life she enjoyed, and it lasted decades beyond her doctors’ premature estimate.
Joan Wesley Tysinger, 63, of Atlanta died of pneumonia at Emory University Hospital on Nov. 9. Her memorial service is 3 p.m. Sunday at H.M. Patterson & Sons, Spring Hill.
For most of her adult life, Tysinger was on the fine arts faculty of her alma mater, Georgia State University, creating and instructing. She also taught at the Atlanta College of Art and the Spruill Center for the Arts.
As an artist, Tysinger excelled at drawing, according to Atlanta artist and GSU faculty colleague Nancy Floyd. “Often Joan’s work focused on family, friends or her personal experiences,” Floyd said. ”I recall she once did an outstanding portrait of her grandparents for a show, and her personal style made a strong impression on people who viewed it.”
Donald Smith, an Atlanta friend, said Tysinger was an exquisite colorist, citing creations she did using colored pencils on both sides of a sheet of polymer, a method that gave her work a 3-D effect.
Tysinger was a gentle but honest teacher, said former GSU student Khadijah Queen. “I admired her generosity, sense of humor and contagious passion for art and literature,” she said. “Just as she could see the structure underneath an object in order to draw it, she could see the creative possibilities in her students and was expert at helping us to bring them to fruition.”
In 1976 Tysinger underwent spinal fusion surgery at Fairview Medical Center in Minneapolis. That, plus months of halo traction therapy, relieved pressure on her lungs and straightened her back, adding 4 inches to her height. “Joan was so proud to be 5 feet tall,” said a sister, Jan Siemens of Belleville, Ill.
Tysinger also had surgery on her one functioning hand, allowing her to open as well as close her fist and to rotate her wrist, giving her more flexibility as an artist.
In 1982 she moved from her parents’ home to her own house in Candler Park, which she shared with a series of women who assisted her in exchange for a place to stay.
Griffith said Tysinger was always matter-of-fact about her disabilities. He recalled the time the two of them were leaving a restaurant when another diner approached them and asked Tysinger, “May I pray for you?” Tysinger replied yes, Griffith said, and the woman said a brief prayer.
“I asked Joan afterward why she let the woman impose on her like that,” Griffith said, “and she replied, ‘What have I got to lose?’”
Tysinger fashioned a dramatic drawing of an athlete’s muscular shoulder for exhibit during the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta but didn’t become an advocate for people with disabilities until about six years ago, after illness forced her to use a motorized wheelchair. The frustrations she experienced traversing Atlanta’s broken sidewalks moved her to make a video documenting the problem, said another sister, Meg Hartin of Marietta.
Reviewing the video in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Jan. 23, 2008, arts critic Catherine Fox wrote: “Joan Tysinger’s ‘Wheelchair Diaries’ brings home the perils of taking a wheelchair ‘walk’ on city streets. … You come away not only with a vicarious experience of the abstract term ‘wheelchair accessibility’ but also with admiration for a true road warrior.”
Surviving besides Tysinger’s two sisters are her stepmother, Loretta Tysinger of Atlanta; a stepsister, Rebecca Frey of Newnan; and a stepbrother, Young Smith of Lexington, Ky.
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