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Mariam Paré pulled up to a stop sign in Richmond, Va., in the driver’s seat of her friend’s minivan. A moment passed before she heard a loud bang. The windows on the car shattered, and she felt her body go limp.

A bullet from an unknown assailant had passed through the side of the car and her headrest and landed between her shoulder blades, leaving her with a C5/C7-level spinal cord injury.

“It wasn’t until I got to the hospital and they were cutting my clothes off of me that I heard the words ‘gunshot wounds,’ ” the Naperville native remembered of her time in the hospital 20 years ago. “I thought maybe I had gotten electrocuted. I didn’t even know what happened.”

On that day in 1996, Paré, then a 20-year-old aspiring artist with dreams of attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, became a quadriplegic. She was told she’d never walk again and that it would be a challenge to use her upper extremities. Once a skilled painter on the road to art school, Paré suddenly found herself unable to so much as hold a pencil, let alone paint with a brush. When she was finally able to return home, she began her recovery at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

“It was just a crazy time of uncertainty,” she remembered. “Was I going to go back to school? Who was I going to live with? Who’s going to take care of me? I couldn’t even take care of myself.”

Returning home to Naperville didn’t mean getting back to her everyday life. Paré’s parents were recently divorced without a home for her to return to, so she found an assisted living facility and kept going to rehab, hoping to find new ways to become self-sufficient.

One of the first tasks she was challenged with was re-learning how to write her own name. She couldn’t quite master writing with her hands, which is when someone suggested she try to put the pen in her mouth. Something clicked.

“It sounds so stupid now, but it was an epiphany for me,” she said. “My mouth could make the same marks that my hands could make.”

Still, Paré had no idea if she would ever be able to paint again. Not much of her former life was recognizable, but being able to write her name, though not as she would have before, signaled that there were more remnants of herself left to be salvaged.

“I didn’t know if I’d be able to live on my own, let alone still have art in my life,” she said. But after she practiced her signature with her mouth, Paré received paints from her occupational therapist and set out to teach herself how to paint again. Only this time with her mouth.

“It was the one thing that I had from my former life, I still had my art,” she said. “Out of all the things that changed, out of all the things that I had lost the ability to do, there’s that one thing I could still do, and that was paint.”

Paré poured every fiber of her being into teaching herself to paint again, out of what she calls her “survival mode”—a mechanism to keep herself grounded and moving forward. Using any spare minute she could find, Paré started with stick figures and progressed to simple drawings, committing herself to relearn the craft with the same vigor she had as the “weird art kid” in elementary and middle school.

“Learning how to paint again gave me a purpose and pulled me through that time,” she said. “Especially with everything else that was so uncertain, to have something to strive for served as my catalyst to survive.”

Today, 20 years after her injury, Paré is painting on par with her abilities prior to the accident. Her work has been shown in galleries throughout Chicago. She’s displayed pieces in the Lurie Center, Per Populus Gallery and the Bridgeport Art Center—where she’ll occasionally perform mouth painting demonstrations—to name a few.

Paré continues to expand on her skill set, constantly switching up her subject matter and mediums. In the past few years, she began experimenting in portraiture. Initially, self portraits fit the bill, though she’s moved on to painting others—namely celebrities. Paré has garnered a few famous fans along the way. Pierce Brosnan went so far as to invite her to his home in Malibu to talk shop (Brosnan is an artist himself) after seeing her portrait of his likeness. And Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb of the “Today Show” occasionally have one of her portraits hanging behind them on set.

When she’s not showing in galleries, Paré is booked for public speaking engagements, using her story as an inspiration for others throughout the disability advocacy movement.

“People with disabilities are doing good things and are quite capable and employable,” she said, with an added emphasis on employable.

At the intersection of her disability advocacy and her artwork is the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists association. After a lengthy application process, Paré was admitted into the organization in 2006. The group has more than 800 members across 78 countries with an extensive screening process—it took Paré 10 years to fine-tune her craft as a mouth painter before she gained membership.

“It’s not just like, ‘Oh, you’re disabled and you paint, come join our club,’ ” she explained. “You have to be vetted and juried.” The MFPA is wholly run and owned by artists with disabilities and its members, according to Paré.

Paré still continues to work on her craft despite having achieved so much during her second go at a career as a professional painter. In her apartment in a Naperville assisted living community, the walls of her studio are plastered with everything from portraits to still lifes, darker hues and vibrant palettes, showing just how eccentric her style can be as she navigates her identity as a mouth painter.

“I don’t like to be bored, so I’m constantly trying new things that excite me,” she said. “I’m always changing my subject matter because I get bored too quickly.”

Most recently, Paré has been experimenting with acrylics, a medium she wasn’t able to use at the beginning of her mouth-painting career because of how quickly they dry and the slower pace required to paint with something other than hands.

Paré’s body of work has evolved and changed like any artist’s despite her life-altering injury 20 years ago.

“Now that my skills are improving I’m getting to play and experiment with different mediums again, and it keeps it fun,” she said. “Here I am, so many years later, doing the one thing that I set out to do so long ago.”

@shelbielbostedt | sbostedt@redeyechicago.com