Art exhibit 'For Dear Life' shows new perspectives on disability and medicine in the U.S.

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz: It’s called For Dear Life, the first exhibition to survey the themes of illness and disability in American art from the mid-20th century up to the COVID pandemic.

It’s part of PST ART, an enormous collaboration of Southern California arts institutions around the theme of art and science.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown visited the exhibition for our ongoing look at the intersection of health and arts, part of our Canvas coverage and our series Disability Reframed.

Jeffrey Brown: Drawings from a six-week stay at a hospital after suffering a debilitating breakdown. A woman in a wheelchair with an able-bodied lover. An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting transformed into an installation.

For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, chronicles the experience of illness through art, what it looks like, how it feels.

Senior curator Jill Dawsey:

Jill Dawsey, Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego: The idea of holding on, it evokes kind of an extreme state of being, but we hope it might also kind of conjure up the idea of holding on to something else, whether it is holding on to your seat, holding on to an assistive device, like a grab bar, holding on to someone else, and also thinking about the idea that it’s in the act of holding on that life becomes dear.

Jeffrey Brown: The exhibition offers decades worth of artists who live the experience in many ways and incorporated them into their work.

Jill Dawsey: Artists create a public discourse, and they reframe the idea of disability itself as a space of creativity and generativity and improvisation and ingenuity. And that’s what we see in all of these artists.

Jeffrey Brown: Artists like Yvonne Rainer, the dancer and choreographer who made “Hand Movie” from her hospital bed while recovering from surgery.

David Hockney, who as he started losing his hearing, relied on fax machines as a mode of communication. His Breakfast with Stanley in Malibu consists of drawings he made and then faxed.

And the pioneering artist and first Black curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Howardena Pindell. Pindell has two works in the show, both made after a 1979 car accident left her with serious injuries including acute memory loss.

Jill Dawsey: She begins to use her work both to remind herself of her own past. So she’s sometimes cutting up postcards, sometimes cutting up other photographic media. You see cutouts of hands throughout this image.

And, in this work, her own body, her silhouette, her figure begins to enter the work for the first time.

Jeffrey Brown: The exhibition highlights different periods in which artists responded to and raised awareness of societal ills and illnesses, AIDS, women’s health, workplace and war injuries, the opioid crisis, all at the intersection of the rise of the disability rights movement.

Alison O’Daniel, Artist and Filmmaker: I’m deaf, hard of hearing. I wear hearing aids. I grew up in a hearing family, and I was integrated in hearing schools.

Jeffrey Brown: The show also includes film like the 2023 documentary “The Tuba Thieves” by artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel.

Alison O’Daniel: In a lot of ways, it’s about a question of the ownership of sound, who gets to own it and who can take it. So the title of the film comes from the fact that tubas were stolen from 12 different high schools in Southern California.

And when I heard the story, I really — I identified with this potential experience that these band directors and high school students were having.

Jeffrey Brown: The literal theft and loss of sound.

Alison O’Daniel: Yes. Yes, and then just how they respond and react and what they do to compensate if they don’t have the deepest, biggest sound.

Jeffrey Brown: Being included in this historic show was meaningful for O’Daniel.

Alison O’Daniel: Just to even, like, walk through this exhibition, there’s — my voice is quivering because it’s to see yourself in a history and in a lineage and, like, contributing to these conversations that see ourselves as worthy of taking up some space and maybe redefining things. Like, redefining sound and its value is remarkable to do as a deaf person.

Katherine Sherwood, Artist: I have waited 25 years for a show as this one.

Jeffrey Brown: In 1997, at age 44, the artist and then U.C. Berkeley art professor Katherine Sherwood had a cerebral hemorrhage, a type of stroke, paralyzing the right side of her body.

The two large paintings in the show from 1999 and 2001 are among the first she was able to complete in the aftermath, working in a new way.

Katherine Sherwood: My left hand is the more freer hand, because I didn’t have as much control over it. So I immediately scaled up my paintings so that I could have broad strokes, instead of tiny ones.

Jeffrey Brown: Relearning the whole process.

Katherine Sherwood: Yes, to paint sitting down, instead of standing up, was part of it.

Jeffrey Brown: Did you think about painting in a different way afterwards?

Katherine Sherwood: Well, before, I would think, oh — when people would mention healing and art, I would just sort of, like, roll my eyes. And then I was in a situation where it absolutely was mandatory for me as a painter to explore what I was going through.

Jeffrey Brown: She also started teaching in Berkeley’s Disability Studies program, a class titled “Art, Medicine and Disability,” from which this exhibition takes its subtitle.

Katherine Sherwood: It’s really an inside look, an inside perspective of embodiment, how your body affects your existence.

Jeffrey Brown: The definition of disability is intentionally broad to signal affinities between a wide array of conditions, says senior curator Jill Dawsey.

Jill Dawsey: To remind us that all of us experience illness and disability throughout our lives, or we will.

Jeffrey Brown: Filmmaker Alison O’Daniel echoes a similar sentiment.

Alison O’Daniel: Everybody dies from something that happens with their body. If everybody had a more — like, a healthier, progressive view of disability and were actually considering it, I think they would not be so resistant and fighting their own aging bodies, and we would just have healthier, more accepting relationships to what does inevitably happen to everyone.

Jeffrey Brown: For Dear Life runs until early February.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla, California.