For Dear Life: Art, Medicine,... | Exhibitions

For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability

MCASD, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla

La Jolla | California | USA

Sep 19, 2024 - Feb 02, 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鈥攁 term used inclusively鈥攔ecognizing the vulnerable body to be a crucial throughline for art in the United States amid the upheavals and transformations of past decades.

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鈥檚 and gay liberation, and disability rights, artists of that era approached the body鈥攊n all its variance鈥攁s 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.

Inhabiting seven galleries at MCASD, For Dear Life is accompanied by a rotating program of film and video. A lavishly illustrated publication published by Marquand Books and distributed by the University of Texas Press will be available for purchase.