Artist Etty Horowitz ’96 MFA was vacationing in her native Israel when she first felt the lump on her neck. She knew immediately that it was cancer, a type similar to the lymphatic cancer that afflicted her father.

It took everything she had to fight the disease as she underwent therapy at Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Now, nearly nine years and a stem cell transplant later, she uses her art to raise money for lymphoma research.

Horowitz was an architect in Israel. When her family moved to Texas with her husband’s defense industry job, she could not get a visa to practice architecture. She chose an art form opposite of architecture’s rigidity and strength. She entered TCU and began creating dance costumes.

“I started working with fabric. Everything became soft, free and flowing,” she says. She also began to feel a strong need to “give back,” to help those who had helped her through cancer.

In 2007, Horowitz helped organize an art auction that raised $17,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in Fort Worth. Last year the auction attracted about 150 artists and brought in $30,000.

This year’s Third Annual Light the Night Art Auction and Cocktail Party is April 16 at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. For tickets, call Nancy Miller with the Fort Worth chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society at 817.708.0703.