Over one week in April, a group of faculty and doctoral students came together to talk about art, disability and care with visiting artist Carolyn Lazard.
Lazard, an interdisciplinary artist based in New York and Philadelphia, explores their relationship between care and dependency in our day-to-day lives. Through video, sculpture, performance and installation, their work highlights the often unseen labor of care.
“Behind Carolyn’s minimalist aesthetic their work is profoundly nuanced and thoughtful in its conflations and juxtapositions of past and present, sound and image, and the personal and the societal. The works address multiple intertwining themes, among them race, social justice, education, institutional amorality, and disability and accessibility, in a way that keeps the generative possibilities of art and art making central to the process of thinking about medical experience,” said Karen Lloyd, associate professor of art, who organized Lazard’s visit and teaches their art in Stony Brook’s undergraduate course, ARH 107: Art and Medicine.
“It is critical, but not nihilistic, and rooted — I think — in a combination of care and rage that I find enormously powerful,” Lloyd said. “Importantly for Stony Brook, Lazard’s work is often about the histories and experience of medical care in the United States. Their interests span the two major sides of our campus, East and West, medicine and the arts and humanities.”
During the weeklong residency, the group of about 10 people read and discussed critical texts in crip theory and disability justice. Through exercises and prompts, they explored sensory-based knowledge: listening carefully to the environmental sounds and reproducing them through performance, prioritizing touch instead of sight in drawing, and using tarot cards as divinatory tools.
Lazard also hosted an artist talk and a film screening during their time on campus. Both events were hosted by the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook as part of its spring events series.
“In all of the events, we thought about pressing questions of dependency, autonomy and community, but in unexpected ways that offered us all the chance to slow down a little bit and think together. It was a ‘learning by doing’ kind of week in every way,” Lazard said.
The week’s events culminated with what originally drew Lazard to Stony Brook in the first place: the Health Sciences Center, a Brutalist structure whose architect attempted to create a Utopian environment.
The group included faculty and graduate students from gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, English, as well as art and art history.
“My research and teaching is in critical illness and disability studies, so I was thrilled to participate in several of the events with Carolyn Lazard, whose work I have long admired,” said Lisa Diedrich, professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and active participant in the weeklong residency. “One of the things that really impressed me was how Lazard demonstrated accessibility, not as a one-time accommodation, but as an ongoing process that requires attunement to other people in the world.”
Every year, the Office of the Provost supports visiting artists to come to campus for a short residency. Faculty are invited to submit proposals, and a committee of faculty awards the funds.
Lazard’s visit was hosted by the Humanities Institute and the Future Histories Studio in the Department of Art.
“As a scholar activist of transnational feminism I’ve always found that arts, broadly defined, touch and transform people in ways that are long lasting,” said Manisha Desai, co-chair of the visiting artists series selection committee and executive director of the Center for Changing Systems of Power. “Therefore, one of the three ways in which the Center defines social justice is aesthetic justice and highlights artivism or art activism. Students, faculty, staff, and off campus community members alike benefit when we bring artists to campus who engage us in how they imagine and practice their art. It enriches and expands all of our creativities and imaginations, what a good public university should provide for its on and off campus communities.”
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