PAC Lecture: Variance: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Disability

“In this presentation, I discuss my exhibition Variance: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Disability, which will be on view at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art from January 29 through July 3, 2022. In forty works dating from the mid-1700s through today, these works ask us to consider how disability and illness are embodied and experienced, and how they have been represented by artists and deployed as visual tropes. These works foreground the ways that culture and art are shaped by physical, mental, and sensory differences that exist on the continuum of human variation. From moralizing, stereotypical historical representations of disability to more prideful modern and contemporary works, this exhibition highlights how disability is made, unmade, and remade towards new ends. Most importantly, I focus on what is gained when we use disability as a critical framework to learn about art.” – Conor Moynihan

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About Our Speaker: Conor Moynihan is the Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the RISD Museum and a Visual Studies PhD Candidate at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). His dissertation explores how contemporary artists engage with and critic the aesthetics of orientalism, primitivism, and exoticism, with a focus on queer, transnational performance- and lens-based artists. More broadly, his research interests include queer theory, disability studies, performance, and identity politics. His curatorial work includes exhibitions such as Drama Queer (2016; Vancouver, BC), Ill at Ease: Dis-ease in Art (2017; Buffalo, NY), and Three Acts, Three Scenes: Your Care, My Care, Careful Care (2018; Brooklyn, NY). He currently has two exhibitions on view at the RISD Museum: Variance: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Disability and Presence and Perception in Contemporary Drawing.

Gallery Hours:
Sundays – Fridays,  12-4pm