Center for the Arts and Humanities

In/Visible: Disability and the Arts

Stokes Auditorium, Haverford College
Friday, February 25, 2011

Organized by Kristin Lindgren and Debora Sherman, Writing Program and Department of English, Haverford College

In/Visible: Disability and the Arts is a symposium that will introduce students and faculty across the disciplines to the vitality and richness of disability arts and culture. The symposium brings together noted scholars and artists to speak to disability as it informs the practice of art: Tobin SiebersDisability Aesthetics (2010), Georgina KleegeSight Unseen (1999); Katherine Sherwood, artist and co-curator, Blind at the Museum, Berkeley Art Museum (2005), Ann Fox and Jessica Cooley, co-curators, Re/Formations: Disability, Women, Sculpture and Staring, Davidson College (2009).

Through this symposium, we want to explore the following questions: in what ways do visual artists highlight or problematize the spectacle of visible disability? What are some of the possible relationships between viewers, art objects representing or thematizing disability, and people with disabilities? Through what aesthetic strategies and practices do artists render the interior spaces of the body visible or call attention to their invisibility? How might nonvisible disabilities or nonvisible physical processes be represented in visual media?

Sponsored by the John B. Hurford '60 Humanities Center, Mellon Creative Arts Residencies Planning Grant and the Greater Philadelphia Women's Studies Consortium.

Untitled fiber art by Judith Scott

Untitled, (2000), Judith Scott
Judith Scott (1943-2005) was a Deaf outsider artist with Down syndrome; institutionalized for 35 years, she is now recognized as an important fiber artist.


 re:Visible
a walking tour of accessible spaces
  1. download the tour: http://blogs.haverford.edu/listeningproject/projects
  2. start at the INSC rotunda
  3. press play
    Saturday, 2/26/2011 at 2:00 p.m.

Speakers

Ann Fox is Associate Professor of English and coordinator of the Gender Studies Concentration at Davidson College. She specializes in twentieth-century dramatic literature, performance theory, and disability studies. She has recently co-curated two exhibits at Davidson focused on disability and the visual arts: "Re/Formations: Disability, Women, and Sculpture" and "Staring: How We Look". Her current book project traces the representation of disability on the twentieth-century stage. She has served on the executive board of the Society for Disability Studies and the MLA Executive Committee of the Division on Disability Studies. 

Georgina Kleege is an internationally known writer and disability studies scholar. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Essays include an autobiographical account of Kleege's own blindness, and cultural critique of depictions of blindness in literature, film, and language. Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006) transcends the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction to re-imagine the life and legacy of this celebrated disability icon. Kleege's current work is concerned with blindness and visual art: how blindness is represented in art, how blindness affects the lives of visual artists, how museums can make visual art accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired. She has lectured and served as consultant to art institutions around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London. Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches popular courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir.

Katherine Sherwood has taught in the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1989 (see http://www.katherinesherwood.com ) Her work became more publicly known following a stroke in 1997, and her return to artwork that now incorporated brain imagining in a new form of medical illustration. Several articles in particular note this "distinctive vocabulary" in the conjunction between art and science, brain and the body: Georgina Kleege, "Brain Work: A Meditation on the Painting of Katherine Sherwood"; John Yau, "The Body and Paint"; Anjan Chatterjee, "Apoplexy and Personhood in Katherine Sherwood's Painting" (see her website for reprints of these and others).

Apart from individual showings of her work, she has also participated in group shows concerned with the body, difference and art: "Seeing is Knowing the Body", Carelton College, Northfield, MN (2007); "Breath of Difference", Project Gallery, Ann Arbor, MI (2007); "Visionary Anatomy," National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC traveled to: Monmouth Museum, Lincroft, NJ; University of Delaware Gallery, Newark, DE; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; The Art League of Long Island, Dix Hill, NY; The Art Museum of Western Virginia, Roanoke, VA (2005-07); "Inside Out Loud", Kemper Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO (2005); "Visionary Anatomies", National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC (2004).

She was also asked to participate in the development of a program in disability at UCalifornia, Berkeley, and teaches a course in Art, Medicine and Disability, exposing these interrelationships.

Tobin Siebers is V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor of English and Art and Design at the University of Michigan. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification (Michigan 2000), Disability Theory (Michigan 2008), and Disability Aesthetics (Michigan, 2010). Recent essays have appeared in American Literary HistoryCultural CritiqueMichigan Quarterly Review, and PMLA.

Additional material may be found on his University of Michigan site.

Jessica Cooley was the Assistant Curator for Davidson College's Van Every/Smith Galleries from 2006 to 2010 where she curated exhibitions, established and managed the gallery internship program, and helped to oversee the care and organization of the Davidson College permanent art collection. In the fall of 2009 Cooley co-curated STARING with Dr. Ann M. Fox (Davidson College), a visual investigation of Dr. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's (Emory University) book Staring: How We Look. In the spring of 2009 Cooley also co-curated RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women, and Sculpture with Fox, the first exhibition to address the intersection between disability identity and female identity through the medium of sculpture. Cooley is currently pursuing an M.A. in Art History at Temple University.