“For Dear Life: Art, Medicine and Disability” seeks to capture the crossroads of health and creativity.
In an expansive exhibit highlighting the connections between the human condition and creativity, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presents “For Dear Life: Art, Medicine and Disability.”
The exhibition, now open at 700 Prospect St., is a “first of its kind” survey of the “themes of illness and disability in American art from the 1960s up to the Covid moment,” said MCASD David C. Copley Director and chief executive Kathryn Kanjo.
The collection features an intergenerational group of more than 80 artists and is MCASD’s contribution to the Getty Foundation’s “PST Art: Art & Science Collide” initiative.
In piecing together “For Dear Life,” the museum “set out to retell the history … of recent art,” said MCASD senior curator Jill Dawsey, who added MCASD is using the term “disability” inclusively, as “disability as something that we all experience or will experience throughout our lives.”
The exhibition considers disability through a broad lens, she said, suggesting affinities between artists and people who experience a wide range of conditions.
The presentation, so expansive MCASD had to temporarily move some of its permanent collection to make room, “is not just an art exhibition, but a reflection on how health and illness influence not only our lives, but the creative process as well,” Kanjo said.
The galleries take viewers through “For Dear Life chronologically, with some works shown to “reposition certain fairly well known artists” within a context of vulnerability, Dawsey said, as in Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 “Hand Movie.”
Rainer, a “key figure of minimalist dance,” shows only her hand moving in the piece as she filmed while in the hospital recovering from major surgery, Dawsey said.
Rainer “positions the hospital bed as a space of generativity,” Dawsey said, a repeating theme throughout the exhibit: “Even with the challenges of illness, … what comes out of it is a creative response.”
Many works on view exemplify what came to be known as “crip time,” the concept that the disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent experience time differently from others, “at the body’s own pace, not according to the dictates of capitalism” and other entities, Dawsey said.
“For Dear Life” then, she said, reframes “disability as a resistance to the culture at large.”
As the galleries wind through the decades, visitors will see pieces by feminists pondering their bodies as politicized entities, Dawsey said, along with responses to the disability rights movements of the 1970s, HIV and AIDS activism and other civic endeavors.
Large canvas panels by Juanita McNeely, expressing a body that survived cancer and a spinal cord injury, confront the viewer in one room, while others contend with lifelong disability in art that belies physical struggle and speaks more to how community enables production, Dawsey said.
At points somber and at others humorous, the exhibit exemplifies the tenacity of disabled people, seeking various coping mechanisms from substance to legal justice and celebration, Dawsey said.
All entries are united in acknowledging the vulnerable body to be a crucial vehicle for creation, she said.
“For Dear Life: Art, Medicine and Disability” runs through Feb. 2. mcasd.org
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