The exhibition Smoke & Mirrors explores a new artistic genre called “access aesthetics,” which considers how artists make transparent the inequities in museums. For the able-bodied visitor, wayfinding 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.

The show includes videos, drawings, sculptures, textiles, and multimedia 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 intended to create conversations about its relationships to race, gender, and ethnicity, generating a more expansive and inclusive understanding of the disabled experience. 

Smoke & Mirrors is on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, through December 22. It is organized by guest curator Dr. Amanda Cachia from the University of Houston, a distinguished scholar, curator, and disability arts activist. Related programs include a SparkNight Art Party featuring Smoke & Mirrors artists; Celebrating Differences, an Art Together family program; a Virtual Artists Roundtable moderated by the guest curator; a performance and Q&A with exhibiting artist JJJJJerome Ellis; and a virtual book launch for The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique by Amanda Cachia.

For more information, visit zimmerli.rutgers.edu.

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.