Smoke & Mirrors

Smoke & Mirrors is a major special exhibition focused on issues of accessibility and featuring the work of artists with disabilities, guest curated by Dr. Amanda Cachia, a distinguished scholar, curator, and disability arts activist.

This exhibition explores a new artistic genre called “access aesthetics,” which considers how artists make transparent the inequities in museums. For the able-bodied visitor, way finding through a museum or an exhibition can be a straightforward experience with few obstructions. For visitors with disabilities, however, such experiences are challenging and the barriers they face are often invisible or unnoticed. In Smoke & Mirrors, artists offer work that conceptualizes access through humor, antagonism, transparency, and invisibility.

Included are videos, drawings, sculptures, textiles, and multi-media installations by Emanuel Almborg, Alt-Text as Poetry, Erik Benjamins, Pelenakeke Brown, Fayen d’Evie, JJJJJerome Ellis, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Sugandha Gupta, Carmen Papalia, Finnegan Shannon, Liza Sylvestre, Aislinn Thomas, Corban Walker, and Syrus Marcus Ware. Coming from diverse backgrounds, these artists present an intersectional approach to disability that creates conversations about its relationships to race, gender, and ethnicity, generating a more expansive and inclusive understanding of the disabled experience.

Organized by guest curator, Dr. Amanda Cachia, University of Houston.

Smoke & Mirrors is made possible by the leadership support of the Ford Foundation. Additional grant funding has been provided by the Middlesex County Board of County Commissioners through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and Arts Trust Fund.

Generous support for bilingual text was provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All programs.

All works that appeared in this exhibition were loans to the Zimmerli and therefore do not appear on this website.