March 9: Granville Redmond (1871-1935)

[Image description: black-and-white photo of two men, facing each other; on the left, artist Granville Redmond; on the right, actor Charlie Chaplin in his trademark costume; Chaplin appears to be signing to Redmond. Redmond has a pen in one hand and a cigar in the other. Found here.]





Well, a Temple U. blog should certainly take note of a prominent deaf Philadelphian's birthday, no?

Granville Redmond was born on this date in 1871, in Philadelphia. He became deaf after surviving scarlet fever when he was a very small child. Perhaps in recognition of young Granville's educational needs, his parents moved the family to San Jose, California, so the boy could attend the Berkeley School for the Deaf.

Granville Redmond was a student at the Berkeley school for eleven years (1879-1890). He was found to be a gifted artist and encouraged to develop his talents at the school. After graduating, he attended the California School of Design in San Francisco, where he was an award-winning student. From 1893 to 1898, Redmond worked and studied in Paris. When he returned to the US, he went to paint beach scenes near Los Angeles, and married a deaf woman, Carrie Ann Jean. They had three children together. Redmond gained a solid reputation as California's first resident Impressionist painter.

So what's with the photo above? Well, Redmond and Charlie Chaplin became friends in Los Angeles (a much smaller town then, of course). Chaplin, being a silent film star, was always interested in visual communication, and wanted Redmond to help him learn how ASL worked--which seems to be what's happening in the photo above. Chaplin also supported Redmond's artistic career--he set up a studio for Redmond on the film set, he bought Redmond's paintings, and he invited Redmond to appear in a few silent films, including the 1931 Chaplin classic City Lights (Redmond plays a sculptor). The Redmond/Chaplin friendship is also mentioned in Martin F. Norden's The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (Rutgers UP 1994): 70-71.

Interested readers can go see works by Redmond--mostly landscapes and seascapes--at the Irvine Museum, the Laguna Art Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other collections.

February 24: Gustinus Ambrosi (1893-1975)

[Image description: Gustinus Ambrosi in his later years, outdoors, on a footpath near a stream, holding a fishing rod and a fish; his hair is white and windblown]

Austrian sculptor Gustinus Ambrosi was born on this date in 1893, at Eisenstadt near Vienna. He was a musical prodigy before he contracted meningitis at age 7; he survived with "total deafness." The boy soon turned his artistic inclinations to sculpture: as a teenaged apprentice, he studied sculpture at night. Soon, he'd produced his first sculpture of note, titled "Man with the Broken Neck." While still a teenager, he won a prestigious national prize for sculpture.

Ambrosi went on to create over 3000 works, at least 600 of them portrait busts of many of the leaders of European politics and culture in the 1930s. The story goes that he was allowed to work on his bust of Mussolini during closed government meetings, because it was understood that he could not overhear any confidential discussions. He maintained studios in Vienna, Rome, Paris, London, and Brussels in his lifetime. For the 100th anniversary of Gallaudet University, Ambrosi was commissioned to create a sculpture of Edward Miner Gallaudet. Ambrosi also wrote and published volumes of German poetry.

Today, there is an Ambrosi Museum in Vienna, dedicated to the display of his works. His friend, composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, wrote a piano quintet dedicated to Gustinus Ambrosi.

[Ambrosi is the second alphabetical entry in Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences, Bonnie Meath-Lang, ed. (Greenwood Publishing 1995).]

November 9: Walter Geikie (1795-1837)

[visual description: a memorial plaque that reads:

Walter Geikie RSA 1795-1837
Deaf Artist of Renown Co-Founder of the World's First Deaf Church and Society
Beloved of all in this Parish and City
Installed by his fellow deaf Scots of the Donaldsonian Association 6th April 1996
His true memorial may be seen in our city art galleries and in the quality of life and dignity accorded to deaf citizens of Edinburgh today
'Come join wi' me, folk of Auld Reekie
To weave a wreath for glorious Geikie'

engraved in gold lettering on dark stone]

Scottish painter Walter Geikie was born 9 November 1795, in Edinburgh. When he was two years old, he survived a serious illness with total deafness; because of his early age at the time, he didn't develop spoken language, either. Geikie's father, a wigmaker, believed the boy could learn, and taught Walter to read and do basic math. At 15, Walter was admitted to the new Institute for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb in Edinburgh, but soon his skills prompted a transfer to the Trustees' Academy of Industrial Design.

Geikie studied drawing at the Academy, and became a successful artist, specializing in scenes of urban life. He exhibited paintings in Edinburgh to critical acclaim. He also published two volumes of etchings. Walter Geikie was voted into the Scottish Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture as a academician in 1834.

Geikie is also remembered, as the memorial plaque above indicates, for co-founding the first deaf church in Scotland (or maybe anywhere), where scriptures were discussed and sermons delivered in sign language, by and for deaf believers. (An offshoot of the church, the Edinburgh and East of Scotland Society for the Deaf, still exists.)

Geikie died suddenly from typhoid fever at the age of 41. A posthumous collection of his works, titled "Etchings Illustrative of Scottish Character and Scenery," was popular and helped keep his name before Scottish audiences through the mid-nineteenth century.

For further reading:

Elizabeth Bredberg, "Walter Geikie: The Life Schooling and Work of a Deaf Artist at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century," Disability & Society 10(1)(1995): 21-39.

Archibald Geikie, "Brief Sketch of the Life of Walter Geikie, Esq., R. A. S., Edinburgh, Scotland," American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 7(4)(July 1855): 229-237.

Harry G. Lang and Bonnie Meath-Lang, Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary (Greenwood Publishing 1995): 141-143.

October 27: Sigrid Hjertén (1885-1948)

[Image description: A self-portrait by Sigrid Hjertén, showing herself painting, seated, in a plumed hat, with a pale-green top, bowtie, black belt, and red trousers; a child --presumably her son Ivan-- and his toy are nearby in the background.]

Born on this date in 1885, in Sundsvall, Swedish painter Sigrid Hjertén. Today she's recognized as a major figure in Scandinavian expressionism. She studied with Matisse; she married a fellow artist, Isaac Grünewald; she designed tapestries and ceramics. She had a solo exhibition at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in 1936, which was well-received.

By 1938, she was in her fifties, divorced, and experiencing mental illness. She had been hospitalized with symptoms of schizophrenia (as it was assessed in her time) as early as 1932; she would spend her last ten years in a Stockholm hospital, until she died from excessive bleeding during a botched surgical lobotomy in 1948.

October 19: Lajos Tihanyi (1885-1938)

[Visual description: A 1912 self-portrait by Lajos Tihanyi, showing the influence of cubism--he depicts himself as a pale man with expressive eyes and raised eyebrows, wearing somber browns, against a backdrop of white and crimson.]

Deaf avant-garde artist Lajos Tihanyi was born on this date in 1885, in Budapest, Hungary. His father owned a coffeehouse. Young Lajos survived meningitis at age 11, which was the origin of his deafness. (Though he's sometimes referred to as "deaf and dumb" or "deaf-mute" in older sources, Tihanyi spoke--he was just hard for many to understand.)

He briefly attended the School for Industrial Drawing in Budapest, but he learned the most from being with other artists. His work reflects the influences of the broader artistic movements of his day. In 1911, he was one of the founders of "the Eight," a group of modern artists in Budapest. His portraits subjects in the 1910s included many of the leading writers, composers, philosophers, and artists of Hungary.

Tihanyi and many other artists fled Hungary in 1919 after the fall of the short-lived Soviet republic, and never returned. During his later years in Paris, he lived in the Hotel des Terrasses and was a regular at the Dome Cafe, where he came to know Brassaï (a fellow Hungarian artist), Picasso, and novelist Henry Miller. At his death, the contents of Tihanyi's studio were donated to the Hungarian National Gallery.

See more of Tihanyi's works, here and here.

See also:

Valerie Majoros, "Lajos Tihanyi and his friends in the Paris of the nineteen-thirties," French Cultural Studies 11(3)(2000): 387-396.

The Art of Real Life [Carol Marfisi]

I was among thousands of museum goers who attended the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is an understatement to say that the works were compelling and heart wrenching. Having a bit of anthropological DNA in my blood, I always tend to not only appreciate the main exhibit but the experiential exhibition of the observers. It is quite intriguing to watch how people respond to not only the main feature in a physical space but also how they interact with one another, but mostly strangers as we journey through different historical and cultural planes.

There were obviously many reactions to Frida Kahlo’s life and works. My co-observers focused on different levels and features of the artist and her works. Some were solely concentrated on the aesthetic and technical aspects of her paintings. Others were immensely intrigued by her culture and social dynamics which influenced her creativity. Oddly enough, I didn’t overhear anyone comment on her disability. Her life and brilliance of her works may very well have overshadowed that particular element of her character and life.

I would say that the experience was memorable for me, but rather typical as far as museum expeditions go. It was not until I exited the museum that the real unveiling of life began. Wanting to go into the city, I began to board a tourist bus. With relative naivety, I said to the driver, “Will you please deploy the wheelchair lift?” I should have known when he looked a bit confused and annoyed that drama was right behind. It took 45 minutes for this untrained driver to learn from a tourist from California how to operate the wheelchair accessible equipment. The driver, besides being frustrated and embarrassed, was being harassed by a string of drivers who were behind the tourist bus. They honked and yelled as if that would expedite the process. Many people including the museum staff were visibly upset at this interruption in their schedule. They were people with places to go and people to see and this one stranger in their midst was holding up progress.

Part of me felt bad for the inconvenience but a larger part of me wondered how much the tourists who saw the exhibit were sensitized by their understanding of Kahlo’s life. Did they have a glimpse into the disability experience and how that may have impacted Kahlo’s emotional creativity?

[Image description: the painting "Broken Column" by Frida Kahlo, 1944]

April 19: Shunsuke Matsumoto (1912-1948)

[Image description: "Back Side of Tokyo Station," by Shunsuke Matsumoto, a painting of a railyard in blacks and greys, with much of the station in silhouette against a grey sky]

Japanese artist Shunsuke Matsumoto was born Sunshuke Sato on this date in 1912, in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. He grew up in northern Japan, at Hanamaki in the Iwate prefecture. When he was 13, he became deaf after surviving meningitis. He moved back to Tokyo when he was 17, intent on becoming a painter. His works in oil and his drawings depict detailed, dreamlike images of the city--bridges and cathedrals, crowds and windows--and later, a series of figure studies, portraits and self-portraits, among other subjects. He exhibited often in Tokyo, opened a studio, married Teiko Matsumoto, and took her surname. With his wife, he produced a magazine, Zakkicho (Notebook) that ran 14 issues, devoted to art and essays. In another journal of commentary, Mizue, he published a famous 1941 essay, "The Living Artist," defending modern art from charges of degeneracy, when most other young artists were serving in the military. In this passage from that essay, he refers to his deafness as he compares visual arts to music:

I often have to defend the meaning of abstract works. When it happens, I have no way to explain them other than to use the example of music, even though I am not really qualified because I have lost my hearing. It is possible that the nuances of color, line, or shape describe the movement of human feelings, as melody can stimulate all kinds of emotions.

After WWII, he started an artists' organization to revitalize Japanese communities. He died at 36, from heart failure (he had chronic health problems from asthma and tuberculosis). In 1998, the art museum in Iwate marked the 50th anniversary of his passing with an exhibit of 92 paintings and 45 drawings. "All of these pictures filled with his joy in the painterly process evoke a sense of Shunsuke's faith in the painting and his deep love for the human condition," declared the exhibit catalog.

See also:

Mark H. Sandler, "The Living Artist: Matsumoto Shunsuke's Reply to the State," Art Journal (September 1996). Online here.

Embellished cast

Found this on the blog of artist Aileen Roberts, it's what she did for her sister's cast:We should all have such cool sisters! (Go see it at Aileen's blog to catch the other side of the design.) Reminds me of the bling kit Sara's true love gave her, to decorate her leg. Or my own son's Christmas stockings. Kinda gives holiday decorating a whole new dimension, eh?

Look who turned up for the October Meetup!

Panorama taken at our DS Meetup, originally uploaded by Edu-Tourist.

We had a great turnout for our monthly Disability Studies Meetup at Temple University's TECH Center. It definitely had a literary and artistic flair. Carol asked each attendee to write down the name that they would like to give to their autobiography. I think we have the notes somewhere, but my favorite title was "I Learned Everything from Carol."

The more formal program consisted of a presentation by Sarah Drury on some of the basic computer circuitry that underlay eVokability, a project to expand the emotional expressive range of people with disabilities through new media. Photos from the public performance of the eVokability: The Walking Project can be seen elsewhere on this blog.

Shoutout to Lydia for the bringing the veggies! We are open to suggestions on artists and performers to bring in next month, in conjuction with the Philadelphia's own Independence Starts Here Festival of Disability Arts and Culture.

Super Heroes, Super Villains (San Francisco, October 4-November 21)

The Bay Area nonprofit visual arts center Creativity Explored, which welcomes artists with developmental disabilities to create, exhibit, and sell their work, has a studio blog, and a frequently updated website--and they need it, because the place is constantly having events, exhibits, sales, and screenings. This one caught my eye, in light of the upcoming Disability Blog Carnival edition on a "supercrip" theme: Super Heroes Super Villains Gallery Exhibition, which opens next month. Here's the gallery's blurb about it:

Fly, leap or zoom over to Creativity Explored for a special exhibition straight off the pages of your favorite comic book. Studio artists reinterpret famous saviors of the universe and those who would thwart them. Laron Bickerstaff gives a new look to heroes like The Flash and Green Arrow, while Edana Contreras contributes an ode to Oracle — the only major super heroine in a wheelchair. Michael Bernard Loggins imagines his own cast of super characters including Super Toothbrush Hero, Super Serious Man and even Super Average Girl — “Trying to stay as average as she can be.” Curator Francis Kohler of Creativity Explored also contributes food for thought placing text panels throughout the show to highlight real life heroes and villains of the disability movement.

Seems the opening reception will include a live band, too.

Image description: A piece of art depicting a superhero in (best I can tell) ink outlines and blue and red pastels, with an intense yellow background. The superhero appears to be running straight at the viewer, with three out of four limbs bent in a stylized "L" shape. The artist is Jay Herndon.

April 22: Evie Hone (1894-1955)

(This one goes out especially for Ruth at Wheelie Catholic.)

Irish artist Eva Sydney "Evie" Hone was born on this date in 1894, in Dublin. She became partly paralyzed at the age of 11 (some sources say it was polio, others say she fell while decorating her church for Easter--maybe both are true). Hone's family sent her with a governess on a trip through Europe, in search of effective treatments, so her teen years were spent in France, England, and Italy. Travel didn't result in a cure, but she did come to love art, and studied at the Westminster School of Art in London (where she met her companion Mainie Jellett (1897-1944), a fellow Irish artist), and later in Paris. It is said that she was drawn to modern art in part because the paralysis meant she was unable to hold a pencil or brush in traditional ways. Together, Hone and Jellett mounted one of the first exhibitions of abstract art in Ireland.

In 1925, Hone entered an Anglican convent in Cornwall, but left the following year to resume painting. In the 1930s, she found herself drawn to religious art, especially to the design of stained glass. She joined a stained glass studio in 1933, and was considered an innovator in the medieval form. She converted to Catholicism in 1937, but created more than a hundred windows for both Catholic and Protestant spaces in Ireland and England, as well as designing commissioned windows on secular themes, for universities and government buildings. She died while attending mass, at the age of 60. In 2005, the National Gallery of Ireland marked the 50th anniversary of her death with a special exhibition and lecture series about her work.

[Image: Hone's "My Four Green Fields" (1939), commissioned by the Department of Industry and Commerce for the Irish government's pavilion at the New York World Trade Fair. It is now installed at a government building in Dublin. It depicts in very intense colors various symbols of Irish culture, including the harp, the shamrock, a sword, crowns...]

April 7: Alison Lapper (b. 1965)

Happy 42nd birthday to English artist Alison Lapper (pictured at right), born on this date in 1965.

She's perhaps best known as the subject of the Marc Quinn statue, "Alison Lapper Pregnant," a larger-than-life marble which has stood on Trafalgar Square's "Fourth Plinth" since 2005. This month, it's scheduled to be taken down, and replaced with another work of public art (so those of us who never got to London to see it are out of luck). The statue was featured on Ouch! podcast #4--how do you feature a statue on an audio program? I'll say only that a megaphone was possibly involved.

There's an edited excerpt from Lapper's autobiography, My Life in My Hands (Simon and Schuster 2005), online here, concentrating on her childhood in a residential hospital, and her young adult years, seeking independence, education, a career, love, the usual stuff.

Rebecca Horn and Flannery O'Connor

There were a couple birthdays I might have marked here this weekend if I wasn't otherwise occupied-- but I want to post a quick note anyway, with images:

Rebecca Horn (b. 24 March 1944) is a contemporary German performance artist, and filmmaker. In the mid-1960s, she was living in Barcelona and working on fiberglass sculptures; working with fiberglass without a mask landed her with a serious lung disease, and she was hospitalized for a year for treatment and recovery. During her time in the sanatorium, she drew, and sewed, and tried to create objects that would extend her body from the hospital bed. The image at left shows her "Finger Gloves," a 1972 performance piece in which she wore long balsa extensions on her fingers, an example of her body-extension creations, which play with ideas of touch, sensation, protection, and imperfection.

American writer Flannery O'Connor (25 March 1925-3 August 1964) inherited systemic lupus from her father. In her two novels and 31 short stories, there are running themes of disability, pain, violence, monstrosity, religion, and an unsentimental, often gothic dark humor that is charactistic both of Southern literature and of the era, but may also reflect her personal experience of chronic pain and illness. O'Connor began using crutches in the 1950s (as shown in the image at right), because the powerful medications she took to manage her pain weakened her bones. She said, of writing through chronic illness, "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself."

February 8: Paula Modersohn-Becker's "Blinde Frau im Walde"

German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was born on this date. She mostly produced paintings, but she made a few etchings around 1901, and this is one of them, her "Blinde Frau im Walde" (1902, Blind Woman in the Woods). In this case, the woods are near the rural artists' colony of Worpswede, where Modersohn-Becker spent much of her short career. (She died from heart complications following childbirth at the age of 31.)

February 7: Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904-1980)

Born on this date in 1904, in Behala, Kolkata, Indian painter and muralist Benode Behari Mukherjee. (Photo at left shows the artist in sunglasses; his name is also sometimes spelled "Binode Bihari.") He lost the sight in one eye at age 13; and in the other eye at age 54, in an unsuccessful cataract operation. As a young artist, he spent time in Japan, and learned Japanese watercolor and calligraphic styles that show in his later work. As an art instructor, he was part of the teaching faculty at Shantiniketan, except during the 1949-1952 years when he was curator at the Nepal Government Museum in Kathmandu. He wrote an award-winning memoir about being a blind artist, Chitrakar. In 1972, director Satyajit Ray (a former student) made a short documentary film about Mukherjee, titled Inner Eye. The artist's daughter, Mrinalini Mukherjee, is also an artist.

This week is the final week of a major retrospective of Benodi Behari Mukherjee's work at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.

Print sources for further reading:

Ajay Sinha, "Against Allegory: Binode Bihari Mukherjee's Medieval Saints at Shantiniketan," in Richard Davis, ed., Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman 2007).

Nemai Ghosh, Ray and the Blind Painter: An Odyssey into the Inner Eye (Kolkata: New Age 2004).

Riva Lehrer wins first Wynn Newhouse Award

I am forwarding an exciting announcement from David Mitchell, about a recent honor for the Chicago-based artist Riva Lehrer. What David doesn't say here is that he and his partner Sharon Snyder are at least in part responsible for raising the arts community's awareness of Riva Lehrer's work, through the DVD they produced and showed at film festivals and conferences across the country called "Self-Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer," 2004.

Simi Linton showed parts of "Self-Preservation as part of her Mini Course "Approaching Disability Through the Arts" sponsored by the Institute on Disabilities last Spring 2006.

Learn more about Riva Lehrer and her art on her website.

-----Original Message from David Mitchell-----

For those who haven't heard -- Riva Lehrer's art was just awarded the prestigious Newhouse Award for artists of excellence. This is a monumental achievement for her work and disability arts in general. Please send her your heartiest congratulations!

RIVA LEHRER WINS FIRST WYNN NEWHOUSE AWARD

The Samuel I Newhouse Foundation announced today that Chicago artist Riva Lehrer is the winner of the first annual $50,000 Wynn Newhouse Award for artists of excellence. Ms Lehrer was selected from a group of eighteen nominees by a committee of persons respected in the arts community.

This award was established by collector Wynn Newhouse, who believe this program can draw attention to the work of the most talented artists having disabilities. He hopes this award will expose the art world and the public to important contributions made by these fine artists.

Ms Lehrer is currently on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her recent Circle Series, includes expressionistic portraits of powerful and successful creative persons with disabilities. Over the years Ms. Lehrer has explored the schism between "normal" and "different" in her art with powerful results.

She believes, "Disability and art are natural partners. In order to have a good life with a disability, you have to learn to re-invent your world almost hour by hour. You discover ways to re-imagine everything, and how not to take the average answers to everyday questions. There is a great deal of creativity in disability if you decide that "reality" is just a raw material for you to mould. So many times, these re-inventions have been the keys to open new doors for everyone." Her recent work can be reviewed at http://rivalehrer.com

Four other artists tied as runners-up in this competition. They are: Darra Keeton of Houston and New York, Terrence Karpowicz of Chicago, Jonathan Sarkin of Gloucester and Sunaura Taylor of Berkeley.

In addition to Mr Newhouse, this competition was judged by Cheryl Brutvan, Beal Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, William A Newman, artist and faculty member at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, Dr Olivia Raynor, scholar, author and Director of the National Arts and Disabilities Center at UCLA, and New York artist Dorothea Rockburne.

The foundation will soon begin the nominations process for the 2007 Wynn Newhouse Awards.
Questions about this awards program can be addressed to William R Butler by e-mail.

January 2: Slava Raskaj (1877-1906)

Today marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of Croatian painter Slava Raskaj (shown at left), born on this date in 1877, in Ozalj. She was deaf from infancy, and at age 7, she was sent to live at a school for the deaf in Vienna. At fifteen, she left the school with some art training, studied further in Zagreb, and pursued a career as a watercolorist, finding some success with her striking landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. However, in about 1900 those around her began to see increasing evidence of mental instability, and in 1902 she was again institutionalized, this time for insanity. She died in a Zagreb mental hospital in 1906, at the age of 29.

Slava Raskaj, sometimes called "the Croatian Frida Kahlo," has since been remembered with her image on a Croatian commemorative coin (at right); and on film, first in a 1993 short documentary, and then in a 2004 feature film, titled 100 Minutes of Glory in English. A school in Zagreb that focuses on deaf education and speech/language therapies, is named Centre Slava Raskaj for her.

Agnes Nanogak Goose, "Blind Boy"

Inuit artist Agnes Nanogak Goose (1925-2001) was born on November 12, on Baillie Island in the Canadian Arctic. The print above, Blind Boy (1975) is based on one of her drawings, which in turn is based on an Inuit folktale, "The Blind Boy and the Loon." The print was made to illustrate Maurice Metayer, ed. and trans., Tales from the Igloo (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers 1972). Nanogak was part of a community of artists based at Holman, on Victoria Island, off the northwestern coast of Canada.

MacArthur Fellows 2006--a few to watch

BlindConfidential and Kestrell have today pointed out that one of the newly announced batch of twenty-five MacArthur Fellows is Jim Fruchterman (left), CEO of The Benetech Initiative, an engineer who has taken particular interest in designing software and technology for human rights and literacy applications; Benetech's Bookshare.org is "the world's largest library of scanned books and periodicals [for] people with visual or print disabilities." Says BlindConfidential, "the word 'genius' may be an understatement" when describing Fruchterman's enthusiasm, energy, and effectiveness.

There are a few other new MacArthur Fellows who work on disability-related projects. D. Holmes Norton, MD, is director of the Clinic for Special Children in rural Strasburg, PA, treating Amish and Mennonite children with rare genetic conditions, with attention to the supports that will work in their communities; Norton's work has reduced local infant mortality and improved outcomes for newborns since the Clinic opened in 1989.

Anna Schuleit is a young German-born artist whose work involves multimedia commemorative installations around defunct mental institutions. Her Habeas Corpus (2000), for example, rattled the walls of the Northampton State Hospital in Massachusetts with Bach's Magnificat, for an audience composed of former hospital staff and inmates. She has also used flowers and choral performances to mark sites of past pain, current emptiness, and common humanity. Her MALS project at Dartmouth, "Ladies and Gentlemen: An Artist's Book" (2005) uses fragments of paper and rust from Northampton to create a bound volume of poignant extracts and haunting details.

RIP: Michael Richard, 1948-2006

Today's Los Angeles Times carries a large boxed obituary for musician and photographer Michael Richard, who died in late August at the age of 58, from cancer. Richard became blind in early 2002, after a surgery to remove a tumor behind an eye. Above, his Strata Various 2004, an upward exterior image of the Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles. Over the past summer, he participated in The View from Here, a San Francisco exhibit of works by blind artists. In 2005, he was one of the artists featured in Blind at the Museum, a show and conference at UC-Berkeley. More of his works online: Auto Reflections (2003), A Certain Sheen, Into the Void, Parturition, Rendezvous, and Site Simulacrum.