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.

In recent years, the art world has seen an explosion of activity confronting issues of illness and disability. 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.

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’s and gay liberation, and disability rights, artists of that era approached the body as a field of inquiry.