Inside a Massachusetts studio showcasing the work of artists with disabilities

Transcript

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John Yang: As major American museums reexamine their collections to ensure diversity and inclusion, there's a growing realization that they need more art by people with disabilities. Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH in Boston takes us to a Massachusetts organization that's been celebrating that work for half a century.

Jared Bowen: Around 8:30 every weekday morning, artists begin arriving at Vinfen's Gateway Arts in Brookline, Massachusetts, heading upstairs to studios where they paint, weave textiles or mold ceramics. This is their job.

Mimi Clark, Artist: Every day I make all kinds of artwork, including this embroidery of my house I used to live in.

Jared Bowen: Mimi Clark has worked at Gateway Arts for six years, a ready supply of colorful threads at her fingertips. She's honed her skills in both fiber arts and puppetry, where she's developed a series called the Bernie and Tulip Monster Show.

Mimi Clark: It makes me feel so proud, and I'm inspired as my two favorite puppeteers, Jim Henson and Mr. Rogers.

Jared Bowen: One of the nation's oldest institutions of its kind, Vinfen's Gateway Arts recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. It was founded in the 1970s when state run institutions for people with disabilities were shuttered. Gateway opened to fill the vacuum, creating a space for people to either grow their artistic talent or tap into latent skills they didn't even know they had.

Bill Thibodeau, Artistic Director, Gateway Arts: We have people with down syndrome, people in the spectrum. We have head injury people who are blind, legally blind, legally deaf. We have people with psychiatric diagnosis.

Jared Bowen: Who, when they begin work at Gateway, collaborate with facilitators who coach, coax and encourage their artistic endeavors.

Bill Thibodeau is the artistic director.

Bill Thibodeau: These people wouldn't have as much chance to get out into the art world on their own. It's hard enough for people graduating from art school to do that as well. So if we can get them a foot in the door and help them as much as we can to be part of the art world, I believe that's important to us and them, especially them.

Chuck Johnston, Artist: It's like kind of an old town. It's like supposed to be a Germanic village.

Jared Bowen: Painter Chuck Johnston is one of Gateway's 98 artists. Once finished in the studio, their work may be shown downstairs in the organization's gallery, offered for sale in its shop, or even published. Johnston's latest volume is his take on television's the Golden Girls.

Chuck Johnston: It's like to put a spin on making it look more animated. Yeah, the Golden Girls. Like, I mean, I did that one and it's like, well, as soon as I finish that, it's like, oh, man, I just wish Betty White could have had that one.

Jared Bowen: Historically, one place worked by artists like Johnston and Clark has been omitted is museums. Recently, though, some of the country's largest have begun a course correction. At Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, it's begun with tours highlighting the work of disabled artists in its collection. Both contemporary and well-known figures whose disabilities are often only a footnote in their biographies, like Frida Kahlo, whose late career paintings were made while she was confined to her bed. And Edward Manet, who had a nerve disorder that often left him unable to walk or stand upright.

Jessica Doonan, Manager of Accessibility, Museum Of Fines Arts Boston: People within the disability community want to see that. They want to see that people like them are creating art and that art is valuable.

Jared Bowen: Jessica Doonan is the manager of Accessibility at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She says it's imperative that museums become more expansive in collecting contemporary artists with disabilities as well.

Last October, San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art acquired some 150 works of art by artists with developmental disabilities from three West coast organizations with missions like Gateways. If their art is absent from museum walls, says Doonan, so are their stories.

Jessica Doonan: Art is such a universal language. It is able to convey things that so few words are able to do. And particularly for people with disabilities for whom communicating with the rest of the world is particularly challenging, the opportunity to create art and communicate in that manner is so critical.

Jared Bowen: And helps break down notions that artists with disabilities somehow don't merit a place on gallery walls.

Bill Thibodeau: We've had an exhibition once here where there were our artists alongside some mainstream Boston artists in one exhibition. And people were walking around and said, well, who did this one? And we'd say, it doesn't matter. You wouldn't tell them it doesn't matter. It's hard.

Jared Bowen: For PBS News Weekend, I'm Jared Bowen in Brookline, Massachusetts.