Vital Signs: From Patient to Power

Vital Signs: From Patient to Power brings together nine contemporary disabled artists who transform the idea of “disability aesthetics.” Instead of reflecting the clinical gaze of medicine, these artists place health and care in their own hands, offering vivid, deeply personal perspectives shaped by lived experience.

Here, “from patient to power” signals not therapy or treatment, but creative practices that challenge the medical model of disability—the notion that disability is a problem to be fixed. The works on view reclaim disabled bodies and lives from being treated as specimens or records, reframing them through expression, resilience, and interdependence.

This exhibition shows how disabled artists extend the call to decolonize museums and galleries into another critical arena: the hospital. Their work questions ableist assumptions, unsettles narratives about illness, and exposes the gaps in the medical industrial complex. At the same time, they invite us to imagine institutions—whether hospitals or cultural spaces—that are more open, welcoming, and inclusive.

The exhibition also reflects the contradictions disabled people often navigate between hospitable and inhospitable systems. Within artist communities, health and care become collaborative and interdependent, modeled through mutual support. In this way, hospital aesthetics is both process and product: a bold rethinking of how illness and disability can be experienced and expressed on one’s own terms.

Through drawing, sculpture, painting, installation, performance, video, and socially engaged practice, the artists featured—Ezra Benus, Riva Lehrer, Priyanka D’Souza, Carly Mandel, Bhavna Mehta, Dylan Mortimer, Dominic Quagliozzi, Katherine Sherwood, and Sunaura Taylor—share powerful visions that connect art and care in striking ways. Their works ignite vital conversations about bioethics, representation, and access, while opening new possibilities for how art can shape cultural narratives around disability.

Vital Signs invites audiences to look beyond the narrow lens of medicine and encounter disability through creativity, care, and resistance. It asks us not only to view, but to listen—to recognize art as a living exchange that redefines power, community, and belonging.

About the Curator

Amanda Cachia is a curator, author, and art historian with a focus on disability art and inclusive practices. She has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia, and Canada. Cachia is currently Professor of Practice in Museum Studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Cachia is the author of Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025) and The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024). She is also editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes over 40 international contributors.