Suleika Jaouad Shares Secrets Behind the Super Bowl Piano She Painted for Husband Jon Batiste in Just 36 Hours (Exclusive)

Few have the ability to craft a piece of art to be put on display before some 127 million people in just 36 hours. But few are Suleika Jaouad.

The journalist and author is certainly one of a kind, and so too is her latest creative venture: a stunning series of colorful butterflies painted onto the white piano of her husband, Jon Batiste, who used the instrument to perform the national anthem during Super Bowl LIX.

The symbolism of the insect and its ability to transform into something else has long struck a chord with Jaouad, 36, who was first diagnosed with cancer in 2011, and whose illness returned for a third time last summer.

“The image of a cocoon is something that has appeared and reappeared over the last couple of years, both on a personal level and also on a collective level,” she tells PEOPLE. “The last couple of years has been a time of deep metamorphosis for me as I’ve navigated illness, and for Jon and me as a couple, as we traverse from peaks and valleys… That image is believing that transformation is possible and you’re going to reemerge as something new and unexpected and maybe even more beautiful than when you entered into the cocoon as.”

Jaouad also found the motif — which represents “hope and uncertainty, strength and vulnerability” — applicable to the current climate of the country, as it emerges from pandemic upheaval and navigates what she calls “deep fractures.”

Batiste, 38, is a New Orleans native, and captured the hearts of football fans nationwide with his reimagined version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Caesars Superdome in his hometown on Feb. 9.

On Wednesday, Feb. 12, the couple announced that they’ll be loaning the painted piano to the New Orleans Museum of Art, where patrons can view it in the museum’s Lapis Center for the Arts, and listen to it as part of a curated musical series open to the public.

“It felt really important to me that the afterlife of this piano be in New Orleans,” Jaouad says. “We’re really excited to have a home for the next couple of weeks at the museum at NOMA, where it can not only be enjoyed by people, but it can actually be played and listened to in community.”

Jaouad was on hand at the Super Bowl to cheer on her Grammy-winning husband, and calls the experience “completely surreal.”

“I had tears in my eyes and was just so extraordinarily proud of him and so moved,” she says. “For him to get to be back in New Orleans in this capacity was such a significant milestone for him and for family, so getting to do this with him felt especially meaningful and important.”

Of course, much of the magic came from the piano — which miraculously only came together in the eleventh hour.

Batiste had come to Jaouad three different times asking her to take the reins on painting the instrument. But each time, she’d said no, as she was in the midst of chemotherapy, which had drained her strength.

“He knew that it’s something that if illness weren’t a factor, I would’ve jumped at the opportunity to do,” she says. “And every time I said no, I said it with some sadness and some regret. That’s the beautiful thing about being married, not only to your best friend, but to a beloved creative collaborator, is sometimes you need a little push to do the thing that you actually want to do. And that was the case with the piano.”

Finally, after meeting with her medical team and deciding to take more time in between rounds of chemo in order to let her body recover, Jaouad had enough energy to complete the project — with a catch.

Because it was late in the game, she had just 36 hours to get everything done. At first, Jaouad was “extremely excited,” though that excitement soon turned to panic when faced with the reality of the task ahead. Luckily, she thrives in that “kind of intense, creative fugue state,” and hit the ground running, taking inspiration from an abstract line drawing of a butterfly she’d sketched in her journal.

Jaouad ended up using every minute of those 36 hours, and came down to the wire, especially as she was taken out of commission for about four hours to do a bone marrow biopsy under sedation.

Batiste and his crew gave her “complete and utter freedom” with the piano, and she ultimately wound up taking inspiration from Mardi Gras, a legendary New Orleans tradition, when it came to a color palette.

“I was going through archival images of the Mardi Gras Indians’ incredible costumes that they hand-bead,” she says. “The colors that I used on the piano were actually inspired by those costumes. I really wanted [Batiste] to feel represented, not just in terms of our love story and our creative collaborations, but the city that birthed my very favorite human and the extraordinary lineage of artists and musicians that have emerged from it.”

Once she was finished, Jaouad was nervous to share the final results. Would it be what they were looking for? If it wasn’t, she told them, she wouldn’t be offended if they ditched the whole thing and just went with a white piano. Of course, that wasn’t the case.

“To my great joy, he immediately understood it and his team immediately loved it, and were so excited about it,” she says.

February has served the couple well. They began the month by winning two Grammy Awards for their documentary American Symphony, and this week, they’ll celebrate their third wedding anniversary — which also marks the third anniversary of Jaouad’s bone marrow transplant.

She says that in terms of her cancer diagnosis, she’s feeling “really energized and excited about the future,” which includes the release of her book, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, this coming April.

“The reality is, for most of us, our lives aren’t binary. Life isn’t either good or bad or happy or sad. It’s all of it unfolding simultaneously all at once,” she says. “So that notion of the idea of a wedding anniversary and a medical anniversary unfolding in the same week, to me feels like such an apt metaphor for what we all have to do all the time.”