San Diego Exhibit Shines a Light on the Art of Disability

By Nicola Bridges

Framed by palm trees with expansive and pristine views of the Pacific Ocean, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego graces a prime location close to a cliffside in La Jolla, California. It is just a 20-minute drive north up the coast from San Diego through the blending communities of Mission Beach, Pacific Beach and Bird Rock.

The museum's building itself is a contemporary structure to behold. Originally designed by Irving J. Gill, a pioneer of the modern architecture movement, it's the former residence of philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps, a founder of the Scripps Research Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, home of Birch Aquarium, just 10 minutes farther north.

Since its founding in 1943, the internationally renowned museum has been at the forefront of showcasing the work of contemporary artists pushing boundaries, inviting visitors to see their world through a different lens.

Its current exhibit, "For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability," does that and then some, exploring themes of disability and illness in American art through an inclusive lens and illuminating how artists respond to the experience of disability.

"For Dear Life" came together with support from a Getty Center program called "PST ART: Art & Science Collide," which promotes a series of landmark regional exhibits that explore and create civic dialogue around some of the most critical problems of our time.

On a recent walkthrough of the exhibit, MCASD curator Jill Dawsey explained that with San Diego being a prominent biotech-research and health-science industry hub, the museum wanted to consider how medicine relates to art.

"The exhibit recognizes the vulnerable body as a crucial throughline for art through modern decades and the response of artists to connect disabilities with larger public health issues," she said. "It's a theme not often featured in mainstream museums."

She was quick to emphasize that this is not a downer or a difficult exhibit to view. On the contrary, it is engaging, thought-provoking, lively and colorful.

"An important takeaway is that it shows the skills of adaptation and artists improvising and innovating," she said. "The works aren't good in spite of things, they're better because of them."

From small- to large-scale paintings, sculptures and multimedia, the works showcase epiphanic historic moments of the disability movement from the 1960s up until COVID and how impaired artists adapt to their circumstances.

A film called "Hand Movie" immediately mesmerizes in the first gallery. A large hand dances on the screen. Its impetus, Dawsey explained, was a post-op hospital stay when visual artist, dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer used her hand to continue expressing the dance movements she missed.

Other 1960s-era works focus on disability themes during the groundswell of the women's movement, the Vietnam War and the plight of disabled veterans, then flows into the 1970s, including newspapers from the Black Panther Party whose illustrations highlight disability as part of the Black Panther platform.

Works by '70s black artist Pope L. showing him crawling at street level in a Superman costume sparked my curiosity.

"His 'crawl experiences' embody a certain pathos in the difficulties of the way he's crawling while dressed as a superhero," Dawsey said. "It's an example of some exhibit pieces not necessarily being about disability but connecting to it in the way that he has to make his body unnaturally horizontal. It brings awareness to the disabilities rights movement and its overlap with movements at the time around homeless people on the streets."

There are pieces from the Creative Growth movement, which in the '70s began creating studios embracing work by artists with neurological disabilities.

Dawsey said that some artists on display don't have disabilities, "but their work conveys an understanding of disability as being more about the obstacles in the culture and the misunderstandings rather than the individual disability."

The 1980s gallery artwork deals with breast cancer, the war on drugs and the AIDS epidemic in a variety of powerfully impactful to subtle ways -- such as Hollis Sigler's "I'd Make a Deal With the Devil," which explores her breast cancer diagnosis and powerful questions such as how much would you be willing to give up to be cancer-free or to sacrifice for a cure?

For the 1990s and 2000s, the exhibit forks into two galleries. One shows the diversion of art after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, revealing how artists drove the conversation and convergence of art and disability. The other looks at scientific and medical advances, including Joey Terrill's vividly colored "Still-Life With Zerit," normalizing AIDS medicine nestled among the typical detritus of life on a kitchen table.

Artwork in the final gallery communicates themes from the mid-2000s, including the Disability Justice Movement, a second wave of disability rights established in 2005, that Dawsey explained as "an understanding of the intersectional nature of oppression and discrimination."

"For Dear Life" is eye-opening, makes you think deeply, and is yet another example of MCASD pushing boundaries to shine a spotlight on modern art and its messages in innovative new ways, methods and mediums, both literally and thematically.

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WHEN YOU GO

"For Dear Life" exhibits until Feb. 2, 2025, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego: www.mcasd.org.

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Nicola Bridges is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.