Monterey Herald

The article opens with the story of how Josina Makau first met Carole Pavlo: newly arrived in Columbus, Ohio as a first-year assistant professor at Ohio State, Makau stepped into a bar one night and worked up the nerve to ask Pavlo, who seemed to be the center of the room, to dance. Pavlo told her to wait for a slow song. That dance was the start of a 42-year partnership that lasted until Pavlo's death.

Watson frames Pavlo's story not around the persistence of her cancer, but around her resilience against it — describing a 31-year journey in which Pavlo repeatedly sacrificed parts of her body to save her life, while refusing to give up the art that she felt made her whole. The piece traces the couple's move to the Central Coast in 1995, after Makau accepted a position as one of CSU Monterey Bay's founding faculty; just a week after they settled into a rental home in the Mission Fields neighborhood, flooding from that year's El Niño storms destroyed all of Pavlo's existing work and materials. Rather than devastating her, the loss became a turning point — Pavlo took it as a sign to leave commercial art behind and commit fully to fine art.

The article connects Pavlo's artistic vision to a lifetime of firsthand experience with marginalization: raised by a single working mother in western Pennsylvania in 1942, she grew up navigating questions of gender identity and, later, the kind of workplace discrimination women faced long before the #MeToo movement. Watson notes that Pavlo and Makau's relationship itself began decades before same-sex partnerships were legally recognized or protected, adding another layer of lived difficulty that Watson connects to the emotional depth of Pavlo's work.

Much of the piece is devoted to Pavlo's decades of serious illness. It recounts her first Stage 3A breast cancer diagnosis while still in Columbus, treated with a radical mastectomy and a nine-month clinical trial; a second Stage 3A diagnosis roughly a decade later, requiring an equally aggressive treatment and the loss of her remaining breast — a period during which she sculpted a piece called "Mastectomy" in 2003, a porcelain abstraction of a woman clutching her own fractured form while looking upward; a subsequent open-heart surgery for a mitral valve leakage and arterial disease; and finally, a knee replacement at age 79 that both she and Makau saw as a statement of intent to keep living fully, followed nine months later by a metastatic cancer diagnosis. She died a month after that diagnosis. Throughout, Watson quotes Makau's admiration for how Pavlo never let her illness show and never stopped working.

The article also describes Pavlo's completely self-taught process — she never took an art class and never worked from photos or models, instead perceiving finished images in her mind and then executing them — and includes Makau's description of Pavlo's working method in her own words.

The piece closes by quoting Pavlo's own artist statement in full, and by detailing the practical particulars of the CSUMB exhibition: "Spirituality, Kinship, and the Human Condition: Works by Carole A. Pavlo," curated by MacArthur Fellow Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains and CSUMB's Angelica Muro, at the Visual and Public Art Gallery, Building 70, opening that Saturday from 3–5 p.m. and continuing weekdays 1–5 p.m. through March 10. Watson notes that Pavlo herself had titled the exhibit and written the original proposal for it before she died, without ever seeing it realized.