The sign next to her table reads boldly, “Condom Pins: $10,” and then in smaller print, “No, they’re not used.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Brennan smokes Marlboro Menthols, and the box complements her green paint-stained shirt and her closely cropped dyed-purple hair. “I like bright colors,” she says. Her favorite artist is Vincent van Gogh because, she says, she is a colorist too. The walls of her apartment, on the second story of a house on Thomas Street near Milwaukee and Division, are covered with her work as well as with photographs of friends–some of whom have died of AIDS in the past few years. From the rafters hang silk shirts that she’s in the middle of painting, and the coffee table is strewn with many of her latest condom creations.
Brennan makes the jewelry by dipping the condoms into acrylic resin and then letting them dry into their own forms. (She likes to use the ones with a reservoir tip because the resin collects in the tip and creates “shapes that jump out on things.”) Then she paints them in a variety of colors, both bright and subdued.
In 1979 she graduated from the University of Illinois, where she’d majored in art. She worked as a painter and sculptor, often using objects she found in the street as her materials, everything from old mufflers to tomato crates. She especially likes styrofoam because “it will last a good thousand years.”
