My Photos in Transforming Community – Disability Exhibition

Laurie says:

I am very happy to have 2 photos in the Transforming Community: Disability, Diversity and Access exhibition at the Westbeth Gallery in New York City.

It takes place during the 2015 Women’s Caucus of the Arts National Conference, which explores access and difference in its many forms. It runs from February 7th to the 22nd.

Quote is from the WCA exhibition information:

Disability challenges all facets of art and its accessibility: experiencing art, art education, interacting with art(ists), and art making. What are new ways of seeing, hearing, experiencing, and witnessing artwork? In the past, disability has functioned as a metaphor to signify tragedy, injury, oppression, and lack. Disabled people in representation held the space of the plucky survivor, the trickster figure, and the liminal shadow. In more recent decades, different perspectives with different cultural frameworks are emerging in the broader community.
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Kim Manri
Kim Manri was photographed in her studio. She is the director of Taihen, a famous Japanese disability dance and performance company. I photographed her a part of my Women of Japan Project.

How do artists find space, time and audiences for expressing artful differences, whether these differences be physical, cognitive, emotional or sensory? How do forms of difference encourage new connections, new conceptions of what it means to be alive, to be in community, to be alone, to be part of the wider world? How do different experiences of the world re-shape what art can mean? How do conceptions of race, gender, class, settler/native status, and sexuality become more powerfully expressed when combined with disability or vice versa? We welcome engagement on this topic under the widest possible umbrella.”
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Edison_Sue H
Sue H was an activist on issues of Fat Liberation and disability when I photographed her for my book Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes.

The juror was Petra Kupers, a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor at the University of Michigan, who has written illuminatingly on these issues.

This broad and nuanced conversation about disability is very important to me and to my work (the photographs span from 1994 to 2005), and exhibitions like this happen all too rarely. So I am especially glad that my work is part of it.