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Najla Brannin A cancer scare only hardened this aquatic athlete’s resolve

For the past 12 years, Najla Brannin has been a lynchpin of the Palm Beach Coralytes, the county’s only official youth organization for synchronized swimming. In 2019, she won second place in the U.S. Junior Olympic Championship for Artistic Swimming, and on a local level she earned Coralyte of the Year. It’s fair to say she has lived and breathed “synchro,” to borrow the sport’s argot, attending national conventions and occasionally coaching her fellow-athletes from the team’s home base at Delray Beach’s Aquacrest Pool.

Brannin had been elevated to team captain by 2021, the year in which she would face a hurdle far more challenging than a dolphin dive or a continuous spin. She had been struggling with lower abdominal pain for three years, and last October the issue escalated. She went to an emergency room, where an MRI found tumors in her abdomen. A biopsy of the tumors led to a diagnosis of Stage III rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare form of cancer, most common in children, that targets soft tissue and hollow organs.

When she heard the news, “I was not entirely surprised, because I kept getting tumors and having to get surgery,” recalls Brannin, 18, of Boca Raton. “I also had ovarian cancer in 2018; I didn’t have to have chemotherapy for that one. So it didn’t come as a total shock. I think finding out I had to undergo chemotherapy took more of a mental toll on me.”

Brannin describes chemo as “one of the worst, if not the worst thing, I physically experienced.” She found herself unable to shower without passing out. She couldn’t hold down meals, or get out of bed by herself. She lost her hair and about 20 pounds. “My body was deteriorating, and it was really sad to see,” she says.

But rather than wallow in self-pity, Brannin approached her treatment with a single-minded goal that some doctors thought impossible—that she’d

be competing in the Junior Olympics some eight months later, in June 2022. And, confident that laughter is the best medicine, she documented her cancer journey on TikTok by joking about it—lip-synching hip-hop from her hospital bed; offering makeup tips on “how to look less like a cancer patient.” “I had been posting for a while, and then one day one of my videos just blew up—3 million views, and then another one got 8 million, 9 million,” she says. “And then I just started continuously posting. “I thought [making videos] would help someone else find comfort in their own experience,” she adds. “I’ve had so many people reach out to me and say, ‘your videos made me smile today.’ I made so many friends through it, and it’s been really comforting.” Caroline Karolinko, head coach of the Coralytes since 2008, describes Brannin as “a “I thought [making videos] ray of light. She almost glows. Even from her hospital bed, she would FaceTime me, and would help someone else I’d tell her, ‘you’re my hero.’ And as she was find comfort in their own inching closer to it, with more positive news, I knew she would be swimming at Junior experience. I’ve had so many people reach out to Olympics. She’s quite the go-getter, when she puts her mind to something.” The Coralytes and, Brannin says, “the me and say, ‘your videos entire synchro community” sustained her throughout her ordeal. A coach in Florida made me smile today.’ ” launched a T-shirt fundraiser, with contributions from across the country, that supported her medical bills. Sure enough, after six rounds of debilitating chemotherapy, Brannin was declared cancer-free, and was able to swim again for the first time in eight months. Weeks later, she took to the pool in Gainesville for the Junior Olympics. “It was the best feeling ever,” she says. “The idea of being allowed to be back in the water was one of the things that got me through chemotherapy.” The West Boca High graduate just started her first year at the University of Florida, where she plans to study exploratory STEM—and has joined UF’s synchronized swimming club, where she will no doubt make a splash.

Michelle Drummond

A Delray Beach fiber artist spins her life story into her 3D creations

Michelle Drummond was burnt out. Living in Washington, D.C., as a federally contracted project manager for 17 years with an art hobby on the side, she decided, circa 2018, that it was time for a career change and a lifestyle change. She favored Florida for its tropical climate, but the connection she would soon establish to Delray Beach was nothing short of kismet.

“I found Arts Warehouse before I came down, and I spoke to Grace [Gdaniec, now the Warehouse’s manager],” Drummond recalls. “When I clicked on her website and looked through it and called, Grace said, ‘How did you find us?’ She said, ‘I just hit publish [on the website].’ That was a sign that I was making the right move.”

Four years later, Drummond still maintains a studio in Arts Warehouse, but her reach extends throughout the city and county. She also runs a pop-up gallery of her work in the SofA District, and she was selected for the final exhibition curated at the Cornell Art Museum in 2021. In March, she premiered her first public art installation, “The Metamorphosis,” inside the Mandel Library in West Palm Beach, becoming the first Black female artist to be awarded a solo, permanent public art commission by the city.

Drummond’s specialty is three-dimensional fiber art whose bright hues echo the Pop Artists of yore—Kandinsky, Lichtenstein, Warhol—while occupying a space between representation and abstraction. In “Life’s Rhythm,” blue yarn conjures a heart monitor with its ebbs, flows and spikes, suggesting life’s peaks, craters and surprises. In “Let it Roll,” perhaps Drummond’s most meta piece, spools of yarn tumble off an outstretched tongue, suspended in midair. “Navigating the System,” with its swirls of teal and white bands converging into a vortex, resembles both a question mark and a river—an endless flow of uncertainty, a metaphor perhaps for life itself.

“I create based on what manifests itself to me,” she says. “The colors I pull from my culture, the Caribbean; I create vibrant art to uplift me and evoke some sense of happiness and joy and peace.”

To tour Drummond’s work is to experience her life story, as her biography and her corpus are intertwined. “Risk Taker 1,” for instance, which displays a hand pressing a button that opens a new opportunity, was completed a year after she left a financially sound career to make art full-time. A native of Jamaica, Drummond took her first risk in 1995, leaving her family behind to attend St. Lawrence College, in upstate New York, on an academic scholarship. She played field hockey in college, achieved her bachelor’s in mathematics, and studied computer science and French. She didn’t have the opportunity to explore art seriously until her senior year. “I always liked art, but culturally, that’s not a career to pursue,” she says. “Jamaica is a very conceited environment. If you’re not a doctor or lawyer, your career path is not very respected. It’s a lot of status, money, classism.” So Drummond played the corporate game “My work is so unique; for nearly two decades, only to find that as a woman of color, she faced hurdles in America it’s not the traditional oil on canvas or sculpture. too. “There were a lot of biases in corporate. I was tired of fighting—trying to earn recognition when I didn’t necessarily need to earn it. I didn’t I’m using untraditional think I was being fairly treated in most of the corporate arena, and needed to fight to keep my material, and for a lot of people, it’s an position, and for respect and acknowledgement. I said, what am I fighting for?” At the time, she made art on the side and acquired taste.” gifted the finished works to friends. One of them coaxed her into following this passion full-time, which ultimately inspired the web search that led to Delray Beach and Arts Warehouse. These days, her C.V. includes more than 25 group or solo exhibitions in just four years, a remarkably swift ascent. In addition to her original artwork, she sells prints of her work, handbags emblazoned with her imagery, and textiles derived from her finished pieces. She would welcome gallery representation to handle the business side of her art. “My work is so unique, it’s not the traditional oil on canvas, or sculpture,” she says. “I’m using untraditional material … and for a lot of people, it’s more of an acquired taste. I’ve exhibited tremendously, and everyone is fascinated by my work, but I need to find the right audience, and the right person, who would want to collect my work.”