A young cancer survivor stuns the local soccer world with her artistic talent

Olive Mitchell, a self-made artist at just 14 years old, has already had a lifetime of scary medical emergencies in her battle against blood cancer, but she refuses to let her ailment define her.

It was Christmas 2021 when her mother, Lauren, noticed some odd bruising on her daughter. Follow-up testing showed Mitcell had low hemoglobin, white blood cells and platelet counts. Mitchell was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, and four units of blood were needed for her to survive that initial emergency.

The American Cancer Society describes MDS as a cancer that occurs when the blood-forming cells in the bone marrow become abnormal, resulting in the marrow not making enough healthy new blood cells. Many of the blood cells formed by these bone marrow cells are defective. The defective cells build up in the bone marrow and crowd out healthy blood cells. 

Mitchell had a bone marrow transplant in 2022. Her cancer is in remission, but transplant complications still pose a challenge.

But this is not a story about cancer claiming the spirit of a young life. This is the story of a fighter seeing the bigger picture—sometimes literally.

“I feel like sometimes, when you go through something like I have gone through, it can try to take over your life,” Mitchell says.  “And I feel like sometimes you need to find other things that help decide who you are other than the bad things you have to go through.”

Mitchell had always been an artist, but with treatment and remission, she had ample idle time and decided to focus on her art. “I decided I wanted to get better at it,” she says. “And then I got better at it.”

The metro’s professional men’s soccer team, Sporting Kansas City, happened to honor Mitchell as one of its 21 Victory Kids for its Victory Project—a program that helps kids with cancer—at a game. After the game, Mitchell drew a lifelike drawing of Sporting KC center back player Robert Castellanos and presented it to him. Castellanos loved it and told her he would put the drawing on his locker. 

Word got out. “The Sporting Kansas City people asked me if I wanted to design a painting for them because they heard that I was into art,” Mitchell says. “So then I designed it and I sent it to them.”

And what a piece of art it was. Her painting depicting her vision of Children’s Mercy Park ended up being auctioned at the Victory Project’s annual Kicks N Fits gala that year, with Mitchell playing auctioneer. She stunned everyone by raising $50,000 to support future Victory Project honorees.

She also sketched a large mural, or “tifo” in soccer parlance, to hang at the stadium depicting a character similar to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, but looking tough with a crown and a cape. Volunteers painted the sketch on a large canvas that was unfurled at the stadium last fall at a match between Kansas City and the Colorado Rapids.

Mitchell, who takes art lessons at the Lawrence Arts Center, says watercolor class is her new favorite. “I did a watercolor painting of an orange,” she says. “I [painted] a peeled one. Half of the peel was on it. So painting the little lines that come off of the inside of the orange was kind of cool.”

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