On the evening in early November when I met the artist Rachel Handlin at White Columns, the prestigious nonprofit gallery in the West Village, she immediately outstretched her arms.
“I’m a hugger,” she said. “You’re so cute,” she added.
I thanked her and replied that she was cute, too.
“You’re cute,” she said. “I’m beautiful, actually.”
Ms. Handlin, 29, was almost finished installing her first solo show, “strangers are friends I haven’t met yet.” Like the blue line of cyanotype images tracing the rooms where her photos, sculptures and video works are displayed, the show “connects the community who didn’t know it,” she explained. “It is a community through the image.”
That community is composed of roughly two dozen people with Down syndrome across the globe who have graduated from two- or four-year colleges — like Ms. Handlin herself, who holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts. In May, after graduating with a master’s in fine arts from Pratt Institute, Ms. Handlin became the first person with Down syndrome to receive a master’s degree, she and her family believe.
For five years, she and her mother, Laura Handlin, who is her aide and studio assistant, traveled to far-flung places like Peru, Australia and Spain to take her peers’ portraits. “I just met them all on Facebook,” Ms. Handlin said.
As she surveyed her work, Ms. Handlin recited the biographies of some of her subjects — like the Spanish actor and disability activist Pablo Pineda and the Missouri-based chocolatier Adam DeBacker — pausing occasionally to glance at the wall text.
“Before she photographs someone, she’s got to talk to them for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and get to know them — that’s how they establish a bond,” her mother said. “That connection with people is really important.”
Ms. Handlin grew up in Manhattan Beach, Calif., where she attended general education classes with an aide and was tutored after school by her mother, who left a job in commercial real estate when Ms. Handlin was born. Her parents noticed some early signs of an affinity with art.
In museums, “she would sign what she was seeing in the image,” said her father, Jay Handlin. On a family trip to Paris, Ms. Handlin seemed to have a strong response to the paintings in the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre and the Musée Picasso.
“Picasso, it makes me feel upset, and van Gogh’s work — it makes me feel energy in my body,” Ms. Handlin said.
A trip to New York, when Ms. Handlin was in middle school, was particularly formative. Her father remembered her capturing the storefronts on Orchard Street using a point-and-shoot camera to pass the time while he shopped.
“They weren’t like what you would expect an eighth grader to do,” Mr. Handlin, a longtime litigator, said of the resulting images. “They had a real point of view, and they were all super interesting.”
She enrolled in a digital photography class in high school. When, during senior year, her friends began looking at colleges, Ms. Handlin “just kind of assumed that everybody else was going and she was going to go,” her father said.
At CalArts, she became immersed in the darkroom and discovered a love of large-format photography, which she calls a “meditative” process. She started to wonder about M.F.A. programs. Her interest, though, raised nearly unprecedented questions about accessibility. To her family’s knowledge, only one other person with Down syndrome had pursued graduate studies in art: Ezra Roy, who had been accepted to Bard College’s M.F.A. program but who died before completing it.
She was accepted at several schools, but she was drawn to Pratt, partly because two of her cousins were students there. The family moved from California to Brooklyn to support Ms. Handlin during her program.
“She was one of the people who had a very clear idea of what she was doing, what she wanted to do,” said Sara Rafferty, the former director of graduate studies in photography at Pratt Institute, who oversaw Ms. Handlin’s work.
Right away, she noticed that Ms. Handlin had a “very unique, singular and well-developed artistic voice,” she added.
In the program, Ms. Handlin began making sculptures of her silhouette with the help of her mother, who sometimes lends a hand with heavy equipment. They caught the attention of Matthew Higgs, the director and chief curator of White Columns, who visited her studio last year after hearing about Ms. Handlin from one of her professors.
“This idea of the outline being an image of invisibility and marginalization — the whole thing seemed to be very compelling, but also something that I hadn’t seen before in art,” he said.
Ms. Handlin’s photography project featuring people with Down syndrome interested him, too. It had elements of documentary, he said, but “because of Rachel coming from within that community and that narrative, it was something else. It was about making connections.”
He told her he wanted to show the pieces at White Columns, which is known for giving little-known artists their first break. It wasn’t a question that Ms. Handlin’s work would be at home in his gallery. In the wider art world, though, “there’s still this kind of resistance to work produced by individuals with disabilities,” he said, which is sometimes categorized as “outsider art” — a term for the work of self-taught or untrained artists operating without the support of fine arts programs and mainstream galleries.
With an M.F.A. in hand, Ms. Handlin could hardly be called an outsider. But through her artistic gaze, she has brought notice to a group of people who are often pushed to the margins of an elite industry.
“I’ve never seen any depictions of people with Down syndrome from within the community,” Ms. Rafferty said. “There is a special access to vision, visuality, point of view, lived experience, that comes with that.”
Ms. Handlin, too, appears in the show: Three of her five welded works are life-size silhouettes. One depicts Ms. Handlin taking a photograph with a 4×5 field view camera, while another shows her exercising.
“As a photographer, it slows you down,” her mother said of the camera, which Ms. Handlin used to shoot the exhibition’s portraits. “Shooting on large format film, you only have so many pieces of film with you, so you have to be more careful about what you’re doing.”
Ms. Handlin pointed out a smaller welded sculpture titled “invisible,” showing an abstract silhouette of herself wearing a “crazy Andy Warhol wig” and standing next to her mother. (It was a response to David Hammons’s public art project “Day’s End.” “It’s like a ghost,” she said of the Hammons piece.)
“People ask my mother what my name is and how old I am,” she said. “It makes me feel invisible,” she said.
The next night, Ms. Handlin worked the room at the opening reception. Dressed in a lace mock-neck blouse and a silver skirt, she flitted from one group to the next, posing for photographs.
“I describe her as ‘Hillary Clinton at a cocktail party,’ because she will meet everyone she can and talk to them and get to know them,” her mother said.
People from various parts of the artist’s life showed up — distant cousins from New England, someone from Ms. Handlin’s childhood therapy center in California, classmates from Pratt — but also art-world figures like Vince Aletti, the photography critic at The New Yorker, and Bridget Finn, the director of Art Basel Miami Beach.
“Rachel has an ability to soften people’s defenses, and you can see it in the images — the way she captures intimacy and confidence that aren’t performed for the camera, but occur alongside and with the camera, and with her,” observed Jody Graf, an assistant curator at MoMA PS1.
As guests started to say goodbye, her parents found themselves at a loss for words. “I don’t think any parent ever anticipates something like this, but we sure didn’t,” her father said. Of supporting his daughter’s creative ambitions, he added, “It’s a lot of moving mountains, or plowing through the mountains when they won’t move.”
“It’s a lot of work,” Ms. Handlin said, reflecting on how the show, which is on through Dec. 21, had come together. “A lot of hours working in the dark room and metal shop, wood shop — it makes me feel tired!”
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