ON A SPRING afternoon in 1991, the artist Joseph Grigely wandered into a show called “The Blind” at Luhring Augustine gallery in Lower Manhattan. The show was by the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who would gain a cult following for her intimate and voyeuristic work about encounters with strangers, and the gallery included photographs of people who’d been born blind, alongside their answers to her question “What is your image of beauty?”
Grigely initially found the exhibit seductive. He’d lost hearing in his right ear as a baby; he became fully Deaf when he was 10, after a twig pierced his left eardrum while he rolled down a hill. “Here was a show directly addressing disability in a way I hadn’t seen up to that point,” he recalled over Zoom in June. (Grigely’s longtime sign language interpreter joined us to translate my questions.) Calle’s portraits and her subjects’ replies were accompanied by images of places, textures and colors that they’d described (“What pleases me aesthetically is a man’s body, strong and muscular”).
But as Grigely, now 68, drove back home to Washington, D.C., he felt increasingly uneasy. Stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, he started scribbling notes to Calle on the scraps of paper he carries around so hearing people can communicate with him. He went on to visit the show seven more times, in the process writing 32 letters that became “Postcards to Sophie Calle” (1991), an influential work in the history of disability art.
The Calle exhibition occurred at a landmark moment for disability rights in the United States. Less than a year earlier, Congress had passed the Americans With Disabilities Act, prohibiting discrimination against disabled people. On the final day of the show, Grigely handed out copies of his text outside the gallery. “It is easy to tell disabled people what they are missing; much more difficult to listen to, and understand, what they have,” he wrote. He ended the correspondence with a suggestion for Calle. “Perhaps, Sophie, you might someday return what you have taken, might someday undress your psyche in a room frequented by the blind and let them run their fingers over your body as you have run your eyes over theirs.”
Grigely suspected “Postcards to Sophie Calle” would, before long, feel outmoded, given the sweeping social changes promised by the A.D.A. He was wrong: Today the broader culture still looks at disability as something to be hidden or fixed. And in its first six months, the Trump administration has not only cut the budgets of Medicare and food assistance, which provide aid to millions of disabled Americans, but also rolled back numerous provisions of the A.D.A. that offered guidance on how to make businesses more accessible.
In this climate, a diffuse cultural movement has emerged of disabled artists whose work is explicitly about disability and chronic illness. There’s the Canadian artist Sharona Franklin, 38, who makes sculptures out of gelatin filled with medicinal plants, metal bolts, syringes and other instruments. She sometimes incorporates expired medications prescribed to treat systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis, or Still’s disease, which she was diagnosed with as a child. There’s Carolyn Lazard, 38, who makes videos like 2018’s “Crip Time,” which tracks two hands, shot from above, as they sort pills into brightly colored boxes, the repeated clacking of capsules and snapping of lids illustrating the tedium of chronic illness like the autoimmune diseases Lazard lives with. And there’s Jerron Herman, 34, an artist and dancer with cerebral palsy who makes collaborative performances that depict what he describes as “images of freedom.”
The increased exposure of disability arts can be attributed to the fact that many people with disabilities were, until as recently as the 1980s, routinely institutionalized and cut off from the rest of the world. The arrival of AIDS transformed our culture’s relationship to disability, as more people dealt with a novel health crisis and artists began exploring its impact in their work. The photographer John Dugdale made cyanotypes as he started losing his sight because of complications from the illness. The painter Frank Moore, who learned he was H.I.V. positive in 1985, introduced new symbols into his work, including coffins, hospital beds and the mounds of pills he took, as he struggled with treatment. By the early 2010s, disabled artists were connecting with one another and developing audiences through social media. A big spike in public interest in their work came during the Covid pandemic, when the issues that many disabled artists had engaged with for decades were suddenly top of mind for the rest of the population: the way communication is mediated and distorted by technology; health care bureaucracy and the class disparities in who gets what medical treatment; isolation; the fragility of the body.
FOR MOST OF Western art history, disabled people were depicted as objects of pity, scorn or fascination. There were celebratory images of wounded soldiers, romanticized images of blind seers and ghoulish images of disabled people as freaks, beggars and court jesters. “Whether it was positive or negative, there was a lot of morality baked into it,” says Leah Lehmbeck, who’s co-curating an exhibition about art and disability from the 19th century to the present at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2028. (Scheduled to coincide with the Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympics, the show is conceived as a counterpoint to how sports champions certain body types over others.)
When the work of disabled artists entered the canon, their disabilities were often erased from the story — even if certain impairments had shaped the direction of their art. As cataracts blurred the vision of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, he darkened his palette and applied paint more heavily to the canvas. Similarly, Charles White — whose luminous drawings and prints of Black American life made him one of the 20th century’s most influential artists — might not have created those works had he not contracted tuberculosis: Because of his sensitive lungs, he rejected painting’s toxic fumes in favor of the pencil. The British painter David Hockney, known for his brightly colored portraits and landscapes, has credited his hearing loss with his ability to “see space clearer.” Yet one reason the subject has been largely ignored by historians is that many artists have avoided the label themselves, considering their physical or mental impairments a distraction from their creativity rather than a facilitator of it. “Art history is disabled all around us,” says Amanda Cachia, an art historian who specializes in disability art activism. “Yet it has never been acknowledged as such.”
The sculptor Mark di Suvero, now 91, broke his back and left leg in a near-fatal freight elevator accident while working a construction job in 1960. At the time, he was preparing for his first solo show. To get out of the hospital after a yearlong stay, he lied to his doctors about having a wheelchair-accessible work space. In reality, he relied on leg braces and crutches to get to his third-floor studio in Lower Manhattan.
But the accident, he recalls, forced him “to change with the way I was working.” Before, di Suvero had made car-size sculptures from reclaimed timber beams and metal chains whose precarious arrangements recalled three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes. Now he taught himself to use a crane, which he began referring to as his paintbrush. “The crane changes the human body’s capacity to lift things,” he explains. After army-crawling from his wheelchair to the crane’s operator seat, he would assemble steel beams, steamrollers and other industrial objects into lyrical sculptures that rose several stories tall. But though his accident prompted the breakthrough that defined his career, di Suvero says he doesn’t consider his sculptures to be about disability in any way. For him, like many in his generation, disability was a tragedy to endure and overcome. “Limited mobility has made me love better,” says di Suvero, whose left foot was amputated in 2017 because of complications from a burn. “Limited mobility has forced me, like many people, to depend upon society. … Limited mobility has made me understand what I have lost.”
In contrast, the artists who grew up after the passage of the A.D.A. often see disability as a generative force rather than a limiting one. They came of age amid the disability justice movement, which expanded on the disability rights movement of the 1970s and ’80s. The disabled activists of color who coined the term “disability justice” in 2005 — Patty Berne, Mia Mingus and Stacey Milbern — considered the fight against ableism to be at “intersecting junctures of oppression,” inextricably linked to fights against racism, sexism and homophobia. A person’s worth, they argued, should not be bound to “the level of productivity a capitalist culture expects.”
“Everyone thinks that the worst thing that could happen to you is to become paralyzed or to become sick but actually, in the U.S., … the worst thing is navigating the systems that are built to kill you if you are no longer a body that is able to be exploited for physical labor,” says the artist Emily Barker. Their 2019 sculpture “Death by 7,865 Paper Cuts” is a pile of photocopies of Barker’s medical bills from 2012 to 2015, about as tall as a night stand. Their 2019 installation “Kitchen” is an L-shaped countertop and cabinets rendered in ghostly translucent plastic (a material they chose because it’s light enough for them to lift). Barker installed the countertop on a platform and hung the cabinets from the ceiling to mimic the way they experience most kitchens as a wheelchair user. The cabinets are just out of reach, and the counter is too high to chop vegetables on without worrying about slicing off a finger. The experience of reckoning with what Barker describes as “constraints that I live within on a daily basis” is disorienting, infantilizing and frustrating.
When we meet at a coffee shop in June, Barker is staying in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. They like ambulatory people to travel at least a short distance with them in order to get a glimpse of what it’s like to navigate the world using a wheelchair. Along our several-block journey, Barker asks if their motorized wheelchair, operating on the walk setting, is moving too quickly for me to keep up. (It is, a little.) They note that the settings were probably designed — like most things are — with a six-foot-tall, nondisabled man in mind.
Just as disability justice challenges the idea that conventional productivity is required for a meaningful life, Barker and their peers often choose to work in media — like video, installation and performance — that aren’t easily commodified by the art market. In the early ’90s, Grigely struggled to find an outlet willing to publish “Postcards to Sophie Calle” — until Calle herself put in a word with the Swiss art quarterly Parkett.
The art world has been slow to recognize its own ableism, but today institutions are engaging a bit more thoughtfully with the work of disabled artists. In February, the Whitney opened a multifloor retrospective of the Berlin-based American artist Christine Sun Kim, 44, who has been Deaf since birth and makes work about how sound operates as a “social currency,” including humorous drawings that look like musical scores with all the notes missing. Kim, who worked in the museum’s education department from 2007 to 2014, was instrumental in establishing programs like its twice-monthly tours led by Deaf educators and American Sign Language interpreters. Recent exhibitions exploring art and disability include “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time,” which toured the United States from 2016 to 2020 in various iterations; the 2021 show “Crip Time,” at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, which featured the work of more than 40 contemporary artists; and “For Dear Life,” an examination of the subject from the 1960s to the present at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2024. That show presented Calle’s “The Blind” alongside Grigely’s work.
Disabled artists remain the most dedicated advocates for accessibility in museums, in no small part because they want their peers to be able to see their work. In 2019, Lazard, Herman and others formed the collective I Wanna Be With You Everywhere to organize performances and meet-ups by and for disabled people. Herman explained that the group is constantly thinking about various forms of access — ASL interpretation, image descriptions, ramps — and not just as means of connection. In Herman’s 2023 performance “LAX,” for example, both the physical movements and the audio descriptions of those movements alternate between tight and anxious (“He steps in staccato steps”) and languid (“He discovered his peace across watery plains”). Here, access becomes a raw material, an artistic medium unto itself.
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