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For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability Series
On view at MCASD
October 17, 2024 to February 2, 2025
For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability is the first exhibition to survey themes of illness and impairment in American art from the 1960s up to the COVID-19 era. For Dear Life narrates the history of recent art through the lens of disability—a term used inclusively—recognizing the vulnerable body to be a crucial throughline for art in the United States amid the upheavals and transformations of past decades.
Inhabiting seven galleries at MCASD, For Dear Life is also accompanied by a rotating program of film and video:
Schedule
October 17, 2024 – November 3, 2024
- Moyra Davey (b. 1958, Toronto)
Les Goddesses, 2011
Color video with sound, 61 min. Color video with sound, 61 min.
November 7, 2024 – November 24, 2024
- Anna Halprin (b. 1920, Winnetka, IL; d. 2021, Kentfield, CA)
Circle the Earth, 1986
Film by Coni Beeson
16 mm film, digitized, sound, color, 24 min.
- Angela Ellsworth (b. 1964, Palo Alto, CA) and TT Takemoto (b. Livermore, CA)
Imag(in)ed Malady, 1997
Dir. TT Takemoto
Single channel digital video, 6:30 min.
November 28, 2024 – December 15, 2024
- Milford Graves (b. 1941, New York City; d. 2021, New York City)
Heartbeat Drummer, 2004
Reuters, color video, 4:19 minutes.
LabVIEW animation, c. 2014-2020
LabView software screen captures, 4:21 min; 2:53 min.
December 19, 2024 – January 5, 2025
- Gregg Bordowitz (b. 1964, New York City)
Fast Trip, Long Drop, 1993
Video, color, stereo, 54:04 min. Video, color, stereo, 54:04 min.
January 9, 2025 – February 2, 2025
- P. Staff (b. 1987, Bognor Regis, UK)
Weed Killer, 2017
Video, color, sound, 16:49 min.
Barbara Hammer (b. 1939, Hollywood, CA; d. 2019, New York City)
Sanctus, 1990
16 mm film on HD video, color, sound, 18:16 min.
About the exhibition
In recent years, the art world has seen an explosion of activity confronting issues of illness and disability. Set in motion by disability justice movements of the twenty-first century, this development accelerated with the onset of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Contemporary artists with disabilities and chronic illnesses have produced influential bodies of art, often working collaboratively with peers and institutions to highlight relations of mutual dependence and negotiate practices of care. Such artists have dramatically expanded discourse about access, while reframing disability as a refusal to conform to the pace, architecture, and economic conditions of contemporary life. For Dear Life explores how this turn was preceded by the work of artists and activists beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. Informed by intersecting movements that included civil rights, antiwar, women’s and gay liberation, and disability rights, artists of that era approached the body—in all its variance—as a field of inquiry. This exhibition explores artistic responses to disease, disability, and forms of unruly embodiment more broadly, tracing genealogies of art that have shaped contemporary currents.
A lavishly illustrated publication published by Marquand Books and distributed by the University of Texas Press will be available for purchase.
About PST ART
Southern California’s landmark arts event, PST ART, returns in September 2024 with more than 60 exhibitions from museums and other institutions across the region, all exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. Dozens of cultural, scientific, and community organizations will join the latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, with exhibitions on subjects ranging from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous sci-fi, and from environmental justice to artificial intelligence. Art & Science Collide will share groundbreaking research, create indelible experiences for the public, and generate new ways of understanding our complex world. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art
Funders
For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability is organized by MCASD Senior Curator Jill Dawsey, PhD, and former Associate Curator Isabel Casso.
For Dear Life is among more than 60 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.
Major funding for this exhibition is provided by the Getty Foundation and The Henry Luce Foundation. Generous individual exhibition underwriting provided by Rebecca Moores with additional funding from Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese.
Additional support is provided by the City of San Diego through the Commission for Arts and Culture.
Related Exhibitions
Top: Moyra Davey, Still from "Les Goddesses," 2011. Courtesy the artist, greengrassi, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.© Moyra Davey.