Michelle Mantione in Telephone Film (telephonefilm.com)
Katherine Sherwood, Citrus Brains (After J.D.O.) (2021), Mixed media on found cotton
The goal of this project is to highlight the Disability Arts Community as a way to reveal how art can be created: in communities, through conversation and support, through interdependence, and within systems of care. The concept of interdependence, or mutual reliance, celebrates asking for assistance, and honors the collaboration that is often present in artistic practice. NUMU provides a venue for conversation and learning to shift perspectives and develop awareness of disability culture and artists with disabilities.
“The concept of interdependence–that all people have needs, that none of us can get through the world solely on our own, and that having needs is not weak or bad or shameful–[is] an exciting and revolutionary part of the work; a break from, and add-on to the disability rights movement’s ideas of independence.” - The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Museums often construct a false separation between art created by artists with disabilities (disabled artists) and artists who do not expressly identify with disability. This exhibition disrupts that expectation by acknowledging that identity is intersectional and that creativity is informed by an artist’s lived experience. NUMU presents art that is made by, for and in collaboration with artists in the Disability Arts Community, celebrating the richness and diversity of the collective.
This project was developed with the support of an advisory group including individuals who identify as disabled, as well as allies who work to support and bring visibility to disability culture.
Exhibiting artists include Susan Janow, Dan Miller, Katherine Sherwood, Krishna Washburn, Heather Shaw, Maia Scott, Andrew Li, Daniel Green, Jonathan Velasquez, Shawn Sanders, Anthony Tusler, and more TBD!
Co-curated by Maia Scott and Katherine Sherwood.
About the Artists
Daniel Green
Website
Daniel Green's artwork conveys an intense and playful fascination with American entertainment and popular culture. Working on wood, cardboard, and paper, Green uses ink to draw figures from television, politics, sports, or history, and then carefully lists dates, titles of shows and songs, cities, and names. Within the dense repetition of his lists sometimes lurks a brief, but direct, personal statement, “Now Eric,” “Shut Up Gilles,” and “No More Treasure Island Movin’ Back,” which comment on his immediate environment and concerns. These short bursts of the personal show that inside this impressive visual display of his memory, the present moment is registered but must be actively sought out amid the tangle of other stimuli.
Green has exhibited across the United States and internationally in New Zeland, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Japan. His work can be found in the permanent collections of SFMoMA and the Oakland Museum of California. Currently, Green has five pieces traveling with “Get in the Game,” a group exhibition organized by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA).
Susan Janow
Website
I am an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and activist living in the SF Bay Area, working with agencies, higher education, museums, performance venues and web developers as a consultant demystifying access and inclusion, inciting joy in designing for diverse audiences and sharing lived experience to build bridges. In work and life, I approach challenges and triumphs with curiosity, creativity and compassion. Holding a BA degree in therapeutic recreation from CSU Long Beach, an MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary arts from California Institute of Integral Studies, certificates in bodywork and sound healing, along with thirty years of creating accessible arts programming; Maia pulls from experience and a deep love of her work to offer programming support, curriculum and experiences with access and inclusion in mind from the foundation on up. Along the way, she shares her lived experience through a love of language, complete with quirky, vulnerable yet passionate sensibilities that feel humble and approachable.
Andrew Li
Website
A true product of his native Shanghai, Andrew Li's most frequent subjects are cities in motion. From Li's quick-handed and deliberate process emerges a representation of how the eye reads the urban environment – how it latches onto certain details and summarizes others, making sense of all the dizzying activity on a busy street.
In 1999, Li was selected to participate in the second iteration of Bay Area Now at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. A true lover of public transit, Li's illustrations were used in the San Francisco Muni Accessible Services Guide in 2011. Several years later, Li completed a 19-foot mural at the new Salesforce Transit Center 2018 in partnership with ArtSpan. Since joining Creativity Explored in 1990, Li has participated in over 60 exhibitions, nationally and internationally, including in Japan, Ireland, and France. Li’s work was presented in a solo Exhibition at Creativity Explored in 2016, titled “Andrew Li: My Life Here and There.” Li has exhibited in a number of museums, including the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, de Young and SFMoMA.
Dan Miller
Website
Dan Miller’s artwork comprises overlays of words and imagery that often build to the point of abstraction. Each work contains a written record of Miller’s interest in objects found in the hardware stores and construction sites. In particular, light bulbs, electrical sockets, jackhammers, and soldering guns. With limited expressive language, Miller learned early to type and write words and numbers to communicate. Text became the primary influence on his artistic practice, transforming words and symbols into graphic elements, and employing an abstract visual language as a tool of inquiry and expression.
Miller has had solo exhibitions at White Columns, Andrew Edlin Gallery, and Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York, Galerie Christian Berst in Paris, and Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles. His work was selected for the Venice Biennale in 2017, and has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Berkeley Art Museum; The Museum of Everything, London; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Rachel Uffner Gallery and Partners & Spade, New York; Gallery Paule Anglim, Jules Maeght and 836M, San Francisco; Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; Galerie Christian Berst and ABCD, Paris. Miller’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, American Folk Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Mad Musée, and the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne. Miller’s work is also included in the private collections of David Byrne, Cindy Sherman, Maurizio Cattelan, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner, Nicolas Rohatyn and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Andy and Kate Spade, among many others.
Shawn Sanders
Website
Shawn Sanders (b.1971) is a Bay Area artist whose practice spans painting, ceramics, jewelry, and bookmaking. His images are often arrived at through a layering process: washes of paint, coils of wire, strips of canvas, or thin slabs of clay are arranged in geometric compositions and coated in jewel-toned paint and glaze. Many of Sanders's abstract motifs refer to what he describes as the “dark obscured contents of the universe — what’s out there?” Other works feature tender and expressive portraits, including a recent book of NIAD community members drawn from life, which was displayed at the 2024 SFMoMA Small Press Book Bazaar.
Sanders experiments in style and form across media and incorporates feedback and chance into his practice. He explains, “I love to collaborate with the staff or the other artists, and to ask them, ‘What do you see?’
For me, my process is all about being different. When I’m making paintings, I’m moving them around a lot: I’ll have them side by side, I’ll rotate them upside down or vertically, I’ll put a new one in the middle… You keep getting different pictures that way, and you see different things. The shapes that I do, they come up in a lot of my paintings and pottery. I’ll incorporate similar designs into new work, but I’m into expanding my style so that nothing I do will ever look exactly the same.
I’ve always been into dinosaurs and stuff like that, for example. So in a painting, what I might be aiming for is for someone to recognize a little bit of either a claw or a tail, but at the same time feel like it’s something they’ve never seen before. A little bit of something familiar and a lot of something new and mysterious.”
Shawn Sanders joined NIAD Art Center in 2021. His work has since been featured in exhibitions at Et al. Gallery in San Francisco, Casemore Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, Kala Art Institute, Chico Art Center, and the Oakland Museum of California. One of his unique hand-drawn books is in the permanent collection of the SFMoMA Library.
Maia Scott
Website
I am an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and activist living in the San Francisco Bay Area, working with agencies, higher education, museums, performance venues, and web developers as a consultant demystifying access and inclusion, inciting joy in designing for diverse audiences, and sharing lived experience to build bridges Home. In work and life, I approach challenges and triumphs with curiosity, creativity, and compassion.
Heather Shaw
Website
With diverse experience as a filmmaker, choreographer, performer, and curator, Heather Shaw’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The World National Radio Show, IPA Press Arts, Bold Magazine, thINKing Dance, and more. Heather Co-Directed Telephone film with Krishna Washburn. Heather received her early dance training at Santa Cruz Ballet Theater and TDC of the Bay Area. She is a graduate of the two year acting program at The Meisner Technique Studio in San Francisco and holds a BA in Philosophy (with a Theater/Dance minor) from UC Berkeley. As a curator, Heather has served as Performing Arts Manager at the Oshman Family JCC and Co-Curator of TEDxPaloAlto. Her artistic interests include exploring the intersection of movement, sentience, perception, cultural behavior, and aesthetics. She is the founder of Moonshot Creative Studios, LLC and is currently in the early stages of her new documentary, The Kid in Blue.
Katherine Sherwood
Website
Katherine Sherwood was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1952. She received a BA from the University of California, Davis, in 1975, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979. She taught at UC Berkeley for over thirty years until retiring in 2016. She currently lives and works in Rodeo, California. Sherwood’s work addresses intersectionality, feminism, and art history through the lens of disability. Her life and art completely changed when she had a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44, which paralyzed the entire right side of her body. After a period of recovery, she returned to painting with a newfound vitality. Forced to relearn to paint with her left hand, she discovered that she “became a more fluid and urgent left-handed painter,” and adopted a more gestural painting style by working flat and pouring paint directly onto her canvases. As Sherwood redeveloped her approach to painting, her work became an extension of her activism for disability rights. Sherwood has exhibited internationally and has been the recipient of several awards, including an NEA Artist Fellowship in 1989, a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 1998, a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2005, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2006. She continues to be an activist for disability rights and social justice, founding and teaching the course Art, Medicine and Disability at UC Berkeley for over a decade, as well as playing an active role at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, CA, which supports art created by adults who have physical or intellectual disabilities. Her work is in many major public collections, including the Ford Foundation, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC; and the University of Missouri, Columbia, among others.
Anthony Tusler
Website
I have continued to advocate for a range of disability issues since I discovered my membership in the Disability community in the early 1970s. The blog shows my current projects and interests.
Jonathan Velasquez
Website
Jonathan Velazquez (b. 1985) is an artist who joined NIAD Art Center in 2007. His practice incorporates music, acting, sculpture, drawing, and installation. In recent years, he has produced durational performance pieces that are influenced by the opulence and absurdity of celebrity culture and professional tropes. The studio serves as a stage whereon Velazquez completely immerses himself in a particular persona, shape-shifting into singers, clergy, doctors, or businessmen. He meticulously crafts props, costumes, and environments for these many adopted roles. Using paper, tape, clay, printed ephemera, found objects, and fabric, he has fashioned bricolage musical instruments, office equipment, holy sacraments, and hand-stitched vestments.
To get into character, Velazquez most often channels famed musicians like Espinosa Paz, Daddy Yankee, Los Parras, or Los Tigres Del Norte. He studies footage of live concerts to reenact choreography, bravado, and minute vocal flourishes. Velazquez then assembles scale replicas of tubas, trombones, saxophones, guitars, accordions, or drum kits. Each item is tuned precisely to the performers’ needs: paper knobs can be twisted and wooden pedals can be pressed on beat with the music piping through his headphones. The construction material bears the imprint of these long practice sessions. The tube armatures of his brass horns are wrapped in layers of metallic tape, fortifying the areas around levers, keys, and valve caps that are worn down after months of daily use.
Velazquez was instrumental in founding NIAD’s Music and Performance department. He has since contributed tracks for collaborative records, and released a solo album of Spanish-language ballads entitled Jonathan Del Norte. Off stage, his works on paper and ceramics capture a similar sense of fandom and rhythm. Written words are repeated over and over like choruses, and symbols create dense, staccato patterns around portraits of adored pop culture icons.
Velazquez has participated in group exhibitions at Elbow Room, Portland, OR; Rachel Uffner, New York, NY; the Oakland Museum of California; and Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; among others. His work has been published in The New York Times and acquired for the permanent collection of Stanford Health Care in Palo Alto, CA.
Krishna Washburn
Website
Krishna Washburn is the sole educator and developer of curriculum for Dark Room Ballet, a comprehensive pre-professional set of courses designed to support blind and visually impaired artists and artists working in the audio description field. Krishna also teaches No Diagram Anatomy which teaches gross and fine anatomy and biomechanics in the way that best supports blind and visually impaired learners. Her workshops on Audio Description for Dance are professional development courses for working audio describers, trainee audio describers, choreographers, and blind and visually impaired dance artists. Krishna holds a Masters of Education from Hunter College, a BA from Barnard College and multiple certifications from the American College of Sports Medicine with a focus on biomechanics. She is also the Co-Director of Telephone, an activist screen dance documentary project meant to promote innovative artistic philosophies relating to audio description for dance with choreographer and filmmaker Heather Shaw, which premiered at NYU in December 2022.
