Bringing A Brush With Immortality to Trinity Centre's top-floor gallery gave Bristol audiences a chance to meet the Lacks family up close, away from the museum setting of the exhibition's earlier showing in London. Helen Wilson Roe's vibrant, compelling portraits trace the scientific phenomenon Henrietta Lacks became — the woman whose cells, taken without her consent in 1951, went on to power decades of medical research — alongside paintings of the family who carried her name and legacy forward.
The exhibition ran for a single week, from 10 to 17 October 2014, giving the city a brief but concentrated window onto a story that reaches from a hospital bed in 1951 into laboratories worldwide.
