Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center Ushers in New Year with Fresh Look, Identity

New brand elements anchored around a key principle: ‘Unleashing the healing power of hope’

Highlights
  • New name underscores status as only comprehensive cancer center in Upstate NY
  • Logo by artist Shasti O’Leary Soudant was inspired by her artwork ‘Wish Field’
  • Updated tagline, vision and mission statements all revolve around hope

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Upstate New York’s only comprehensive cancer is marking its 120th anniversary with a fresh identity. Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center is ushering in 2018 with a new name, mission and vision that are anchored around a central principle: “Unleashing the healing power of hope.”

“We are a new Roswell Park with new ideas, new energy and new goals,” says center President and CEO Candace S. Johnson, PhD. “We need an identity that speaks to who we are and what we mean to people. And we have that now.”

The center’s new logo was adapted by Buffalo artist Shasti O’Leary Soudant from Wish Field, the installation she created for the lobby of Roswell Park’s Scott Bieler Clinical Sciences Center in 2016. “You’re looking for hope, something reassuring,” O’Leary Soudant, a cancer survivor, said last year, recalling the fears and concerns she experienced when she was in treatment for lymphoma while living in Colorado in 1999. “I felt it was important that I contribute something that would lend itself to the hopeful, wishful, welcoming aspect of (Roswell Park).”

In creating the bronze artwork, O’Leary Soudant was inspired by a memory from her childhood — of sitting in a field of dandelions with her mother and making a wish as she blew away the seedy, wispy strands of a dandelion head. The new Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center logo, in blue and white, captures such a moment of hopeful wishing.

“The reason that I was so excited (about this project), the reason that I felt such an immense rush, is that Roswell and places like it — these people saved my life. That intensely personal experience of pride that I feel is so much more meaningful just because of who it’s for,” the artist notes in a video revealing the new logo.

“When we listened to feedback from our patients, their family members, our faculty and staff, we kept hearing the word ‘hope’: Hope for the future. Therapies that give me hope. Hope for a cure. Roswell Park gave me hope,” adds Dr. Johnson. “Shasti’s work has been such a beautiful illustration of the ways that hope inspires and connects the whole community around Roswell Park, and we knew Wish Field was the perfect anchor for our rebranding effort.”

The cancer center has also implemented new vision and mission statements, which are available online.

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, previously known as Roswell Park Cancer Institute, was founded in 1898 by Buffalo surgeon Dr. Roswell Park, who initiated the model of having cancer clinicians work alongside cancer researchers so both teams could inform and inspire one another. The center was one of the inaugural three facilities recognized as a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center, in 1974, and today remains the only New York State organization outside of New York City to hold that prestigious distinction.

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Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center is a community united by the drive to eliminate cancer’s grip on humanity — by unlocking its secrets through personalized approaches and unleashing the healing power of hope. Founded by Dr. Roswell Park in 1898, it is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in Upstate New York. Learn more at www.roswellpark.org, or contact us at 1-800-ROSWELL (1-800-767-9355) or ASKRoswell@roswellpark.org.

Media Contact

Annie Deck-Miller, Senior Media Relations Manager
716-845-8593; annie.deck-miller@roswellpark.org