Disability and Sexism in the Arts
An interview with painters Katherine Sherwood and Riva Lehrer
Until a few years ago I thought that the only other disabled artist was Frida Kahlo. As a young disabled painter I felt isolated and in many ways at a complete loss as to how to deal with the sensitive reality of disability in the critical world of the arts. As my work and my career evolved over the years, I began to realize that my sense of isolation did not stem from my body, but from a world that was both discriminatory and inaccessible. I also realized that Frida Kahlo and I were not alone. The art world has always been full of ill and disabled bodies who have either been erased from history (as many women artists have been), or who had to hide their impairments and not discuss them if they wanted to be accepted within that environment.
The past few decades have witnessed incredible progress by disabled people in claiming their entitlement to civil rights, respect, and value. This change has been similar to that of women’s movements and African Americans- we are exerting our right to equal personhood and dismantling the discourses that represent our bodies as lesser for whichever reason. The art world has also been a battleground for this struggle. Riva Lehrer and Katherine Sherwood are two successful American artists, who in asserting and expressing their disabilities in a creative capacity, are helping to lead the way for other artists who are disabled
Although achieving equality in the arts world still has a long way to go, Riva and Katherine have been influential in opening up this dialogue and refusing to be ‘erased’. I recently met with Riva and Katherine to discuss their thoughts on disability, discrimination and sexism within the art world.
S: So should we start? How is disability seen in the art world and how are disabled artists perceived?
K: I feel that people may have rather problematic perceptions of us. In the United States, it is generally assumed that “disabled art” is created by intellectually disabled people and relegated to “outsider” status. Additionally, it seems that we are all dealing with a confrontational issue which some observers project their fears onto.
R: I would agree with Katherine in both of those points. There was a lot of interest in body art in the 80s and we weren’t included in that dialogue. Partly I think art dealing with AIDS was about physical disability. Art about AIDS had this strange “hook”… I don’t know how else to put it.
S: You mean compared to art in relation to other illnesses or disability?
R: Yes, it seemed like this strange key in the door, within the association between sex and AIDS. People’s fascinations with sex made them look more closely at pieces regarding illness. And because we’ve been perceived as not sexual and unattractive, talking about our bodies is unappealing to people who feel that physical perceptions are a major preoccupation within the arts. AIDS was a weird phenomenon in the history of disability/illness art… The art world is at this point extremely, and much more than ever, absorbed in art by young people. Art about pop culture. I think what’s underneath, is that art that is engrossed in sex, fashion, and trendiness and a fear of getting old. So, it feels that we are up against art that’s really invested in a diametrically opposed sense of what we work on. As well as that, disabled artists are often seen as ‘untrained,’ and ‘unprofessional,’ which compounds the issue, in terms of challenging more ‘mainstream’ art.
S: I wanted you both to talk about your experiences as women… I think that has a lot to do with what you’re saying, Riva, about culture in general and in terms of youth and beauty. Or if not ‘beauty,’ then a strange combination of sexuality and grotesqueness or something… a sort of level of ‘coolness’ that has to be there. Disabled women often don’t fit into those ideas. How have you felt about the effects of this?
R: Well, when I went to art school originally in the 70s there was a growth of feminist artwork, but I went to a school that seemed to disregard it... Some of my earliest education was a real battle because of being a female artist. I went to University of Cincinnati; the entire faculty was male, and all on the verge of retirement. They were very threatened by incoming female students and I think that there hadn’t been many female students before. They knew about feminist work but it was kept out of conversations. I was told that clearly I was just going to get married because I had a boyfriend and why bother to go to school. I think that if you have a man who is disabled and does artwork about his body, he’s got paradigms to draw on. Men have access to the idea of the ‘warrior’s’ body, but women don’t. When a man has scars or amputations, when a man is physically disabled there is a background picture of a scarred warrior. He can be proud of his body because of the bravery that his injured body symbolizes. But women haven’t had access to that image. Rather, we have the ‘survivor’ body, but the survivor body is a passive victim body… cancer, domestic abuse. I think it’s a kind of dead endedness. The soldier is there for the community, if you’ve survived, you’ve done something for the community. But with a female, it begins and ends in her body. That part of the problem of talking about disability, that it’s confined to just the issue of body of the disabled person and has no societal meaning, that’s a huge issue. The disabled man is desired, or expresses desire because of this connection to still being sexually worthwhile because of the connection to being a warrior. The injured warrior is something people can understand being attracted to. But when a woman is disabled, anyone who feels desire for her is perverse. It means one of two things; that he/she must be a wonderful human being who sees past that disability, or that it is an expression of his/her perversity by desiring this women.
K: In my life I’ve been so surrounded by women. All of the men in my family died so we were all women and all of my sisters have daughters. I went to girl’s school and girl’s camp. I feel that feminism chose me rather than me having a notion about attaching myself to those ideas. Also, I had a completely different experience in college than Riva, I never for a minute felt like it was a lesser situation because I was a woman. I did second generation feminist work that was fused with a punk aesthetic, in criticizing first generation feminist artists like Judy Chicago. That art was always accepted in a place like San Francisco that had a long history of rebellion and art being constructed around those ideas, such as with the Beat movement. When I went to New York, I really felt that because of the generation before me, the path was cleared for women.
R: I didn’t really begin to experience that until I moved here. What about you Sunny? Have you been aware of this? You’re so much younger; does feminism seem like something that’s always been there?
S: I think it’s very subtle and is expressed in commentaries and values. Artists like Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin and so many others in contemporary art create images of gigantic breasted blonde women. If you look at the well-known popular artists at the moment-and it’s sort of true for men too- the women are all very good looking. That’s the impression that I get. It seems that in society, being a disabled woman is almost like an amplified version of being a woman in terms of issues such as discrimination. Physical discrimination and internalizing the lack of certain features that are valued are on hyper drive when you’re disabled. In the recent movie about Frida Kahlo, they turned her into Salma Hayek who is conventionally gorgeous, when in reality she was very disabled, had very withered legs and walked with a limp. Women in history are made and remembered as being beautiful, aesthetized, if a woman did something powerful she must have been beautiful. If she was beautiful in a different way, she is made beautiful in a normalized way now.
R: If you see somebody who is very beautiful in a movie and everyone is pursuing this person, the idea is that their beauty is giving permission for the extreme behavior around them, because everyone would have the same reaction, fascination and desire.
S: It also begs a question in terms of defining ‘beauty’. In Frida’s case, she possessed an incredibly exotic and erotic charm and people did fall in love with her because she was beautiful, but not in the normalized sense of the word. So I think that for that story to make sense in the cinema, they had to make that beauty normalized so that people wouldn’t be confused by why everyone was in love with a woman with skinny legs, a limp, and a mustache.
R: Frida fills so many different needs, its part of what she’s about. Ethnicity and sexuality and disability and drama in relationships and politics… Think about Born on the Fourth Of July, or about Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot… a lot of actors and actresses who have portrayed disabled people are beautiful.
S: it is true that it very much seems to be the case for men too. Do you feel that sexism in general, but not necessarily linked with disability, is an issue in the art world?
K: I think it is when you simply look at the prices men get for their work are so much higher than women.
R: Yes. Absolutely, we’re supposed to be living in a ‘post-feminist’ era, but it’s similar to the point you had made about female art stars, all these really cute and glamorous women. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a fat women in the art mags. My guess is that there are fat artists out there. Just a guess!
S: Back to my question of the way in which disabled artists are perceived. How much of the opinion of disabled artists has been formed by the ‘medical’ model of disability? For example, with ideas of disabled artists only doing art therapy, charity art, or the condescending aesthetics of disability art organizations?
K: Well I can say that the medical model of disability was in full swing in the press that I received after my stroke, in the terminology, such that it was focused around a sense of ‘overcoming’ difficulties in relation to disability.
S: Were you more aware of the issues after you gained more of a disability rights perspective?
K: I already had a little bit of it, I had mentored several disabled art students, and had been on the board of the Disability Studies Program at UC Berkeley, but I didn’t link it together at first. I didn’t associate with my own experience until afterwards when the persistent labeling as “girl overcoming disability” made me increasingly angry.
R: How did you deal with that?
K: Eventually I was able to theorize it and incorporate it into my lectures in my Art, Medicine & Disability classes at Berkeley. It left me feeling disheartened before I could try to transform it. When I was first reviewed after the cerebral hemorrhage, the San Francisco Chronicle critic clearly projected his bodily fears onto the work. He pathologized and misread the work, which was jolting to me because they were the most joyous paintings about the fact that I had made it through and could paint again. Bizarrely, the reviewer compared my case to that of William De Kooning, the 85 year old male painter with Alzheimer’s. I felt that it seemed to underline the pervasiveness of the medical model of disability.
R: What an astonishing insult. Sunny, when you first started showing your work did you have exhibitions in which no one knew how you produced the work?
S: I lived in a small town and at a certain point you just knew everybody. I was 14 when I first showed at a vegetarian restaurant/gallery space. My dad had made a little sign showing me painting with my mouth with a brief bio. I had no sense of disability politics and I had internalized a lot of things so I didn’t understand what annoyed me about that at the time, after a few years it turned into a deep frustration that that’s what everyone wanted to talk about. I was this young kid who painted with her mouth, a human-interest story! I felt very frustrated and I wanted people to just see my art and not worry about who made it or how. I even went through a period where I wanted to pretend a male friend made them just in hopes that then the paintings themselves would be seen. I questioned if my work was remotely good, or if people were just interested in it because of the story. However, before I moved to New York I won a competition in our town’s civic center. They picked my piece out of a huge number of works by local artists and without knowing who I was. It had been the first time that my art received attention without my story. Now, I want to communicate about disability. I want people to know that I painted the work, but I want it to be through a vocabulary and discourse of disability that I choose- not those sorts of stories regarding a sense of ‘overcoming’, but instead, as a political statement. I’m interested in this dialogue that we three are having, because we all approach it from different angles- Riva, you were born disabled but came to the art scene when it was still completely heedless about disability. Katherine, you experienced disability midway through an already successful career, when still the idea of disability art was just materializing. You both paved the way for artists like me. I was born disabled, so it will always be a part of my career, but I’m coming to the art world as a second generation disability artist and so I have role models in you both and many others.. It’s a lot easier for me now as a disabled artist than it was for you both perhaps, because I know there is something called disability arts. It’s like what you were saying about feminism, Katherine. There is a path already paved, and so I’m getting less of that original struggle, but still the discrimination is a major issue. Katherine, how does experiencing life as a disabled artist mid-career alter the opinion of your art?
K: A huge commotion was made over my post-stroke paintings and how different they were from the pre-strokes ones. This irritated my friends greatly. This was more or less a fiction promulgated by mainstream feature writers because it made a good story. The work is altered but it didn’t come out of the blue, it was tended by 20 years of painting with my right hand. I have the paintings that tell an alternative story. I had used brain imagery in my paintings for six years previous to the stroke. It took a while for my life to catch up to my art. An art dealer came up to me after an opening and asked “How does it feel to be a better left-handed painter than a right-handed one?” I was momentarily annoyed but then realized that she was right. When I was in the Whitney Biennial it felt that for the first time there was a preponderance of non-New York artists included. However, this was an idea that went over badly with the New York press.
K: How has your press been Riva?
R: I have been reviewed both ways, but I’ve never been involved in the type of shows that Katherine has, so I have never encountered that level of exposure. Personally, I feel frustrated in the sense that I have only very recently had much ambition in wanting to have a real career. Most of my life I felt like I was lucky to get any attention at all.
S: Well and that must be frustrating, because you are so well known and acclaimed in the disability world, and that in itself shows the level of discrimination in the art-world… the fact that they don’t notice your work so much, even though you are the disability artist. Something just occurred to me, which just shows how complicated things are… which is that you and I are also dealing with the discrimination that is felt by figurative and representational artists. In the art world today, being a representational painter is a huge no no. And this has nothing to do with being disabled or being female. My impression is that it’s really hard to be even a painter these days, let alone a representational painter.
R: For the most part I hate the art world. I don’t see much in it that makes me feel like it’s worth being on the planet. I see a hell of a lot of work that is just exhaustingly bitter, depressing, ironic, I see a lot of stuff that doesn’t do anything for me as a human. Some of it is fun to look at- I don’t understand devoting your life to most of it, but maybe I’m just a provincial idiot. But most of the artists I really admire are generally not fashionable or are only fashionable after they die. It’s reduced to a question of why art is made and what is there in art that really makes you feel enhanced as a human being? Its not that I wouldn’t love to be successful, but it just seems like I have to make this decision to make work that does what I want in this world and make an impact on my culture and hope that the world was a little bit improved because I was doing this stuff. That’s what I have to hold on to. Its not that my work doesn’t sell, but it’s really hard. The art world is a bully that doesn’t give much and just takes and it’s also a big fashion house. Most of it is not about what art can do for the full human. Everyone as depressed as I am?
R: It’s tough, if you opt out and become this outsiderish thing you can’t go back. It’s so hard to make artwork. You have to really want to make it. Its painful, there are a lot of other ways you could spend your time than playing with colored mud.
K: In an interview with Martin Scorsese, a friend talked about him having the three essential components of being a successful artist. One- he had talent, two he had passion for his art form and three he accepted rejection. I have been contemplating rejection and forgiveness, as part of my art practice. I think that it’s with the artist everyday of their life. It’s a looming reality we all have to face.
S: Back to disability- do you all think that one’s work needs to be about disability to be considered disability art? And also I want to ask specifically about your work and how you feel these issues affect your work?
S: I think that there is a debate within the disability world between disability art and art made by disabled people, that disability art is content dealing with disability, whereas a disabled artist maybe doesn’t deal with those issues at all in their work.
R: I don’t think you have to take it on directly, I think if there’s going to be an area of disabled art it should be able to encompass the subtle most unrelated things. A lot of work isn’t going to be readily accessible and readily interpreted as disability related and people may or may not want to choose a narrative that takes it there. To answer the second question, my major interest has been related to how the shape of a person’s body influences and informs their life. A lot of people don’t think more deeply about who they are based on who they are physically. I don’t think that it’s the only determinant or a dominant determinant, but it’s certainly a major one. Disability is its own paradigm but it’s also like a magnifying glass. I’m currently working on a series of portraits of disabled and nondisabled and questions about life. I’ve been obsessed with the theme of beauty. Beauty as a motivator of action provides permission in our society for behavior and a kind of privilege. I’m trying to understand that loop between the outside body and the inside person. I find disabled people alluring and beautiful, but I also find that their stories are often more unexpected. The concept is the dialogue and the conversation between the inside and the outside.
K: I agree that you don’t have to take on disability directly, but that more than likely it will be in the layers expressing themselves anyway. Take for example, the paintings of Tim Lynne, a quadriplegic since age 23, who paints stunning representations of strapping firemen rescuing people. What about the non-disabled artists who investigate disability themes with incredible effectiveness- like Marc Quinn? His piece ‘The Fourth Plinth’ was provocative and reaffirming with its stately portrait of Alison Lapper, 81/2 months pregnant without arms, next to Lord Nelson’s column, the epitome of a male phallic homage, who had lost an arm in battle. It serves to underscore Riva’s theories. My paintings combine images of the brain such as my cerebral angiogram and 16th. and 17th. century nuero-anatomy with Solomon’s seals’s. Solomon was the king of Jerusalem personage honored by the Jewish and Arabic world. His seals represent the spirits he harnessed to deliver him his tremendous wisdom, fortune and fame. I chose the seals about healing to address different aspects of the disabled body.
Katherine Sherwood’s acclaimed mixed-media paintings gracefully investigate the point at which the essential aspects of art, medicine, and disability intersect. Her works juxtapose abstracted medical images, such as cerebral angiograms of the artist’s brain, with fluid renderings of ancient patterns; the paintings thus explore and reveal, with a most unusual palette, the strange nature of our time and current visual culture. Sherwood’s work was exhibited in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and at Yerba Buena Art Center in 2003. Sherwood has had solo exhibitions recently at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, Hemphill Gallery in Washington DC and Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. The interdisciplinary relevance of her work has led to her recent participation in “Visionary Anatomies” at the National Academy of Science in Washington DC and “Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women’s Health in Contemporary Art” at the Kemper Museum in St. Louis. She co-curated the exhibition “Blind at the Museum” at the Berkeley Art Museum, and organized an accompanying conference at UC Berkeley, where she is also a professor in the Art Department. Sherwood is a recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship 2005-2006.
Riva Lehrer explores the ways in which the shape of one’s body affects the shape of one’s life, through visual art and in her writing. Her best-known project is Circle Stories; begun in 1997 this is a series of 10 collaborative portraits that portray artists and academics who have significant disabilities. Participants included such important figures as painter Hollis Sigler, dancer William “Crutchmaster” Shannon, poet Eli Clare, playwright Susan Nussbaum and performance artist Tekki Lomnicki. Lehrer”s new series, Totems and Familiars, continues to explore bodily experience through people’s personal symbols of power. Ms. Lehrer was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1958. She attended the University of Cincinnati and the School of the Art Institute.. Ms. Lehrer is on faculty at the School of the Art Institute and was visiting artist in Medical Humanities at the University of Chicago at Illinois. She has recently become curator for the new Disability Arts and Culture Project at Access Living of Chicago.