[ Horns honking ] Shannon: I'm very aware of, like, when someone is behind me who wants to pass me and moving to the side.

That's kind of a classic New Yorker thing, is to feel annoyed with people who are going a different pace.

I've been disabled my whole life, since I was born.

It primarily affects my movement.

I move slower, I walk with a little bit of a wobble.

My pace is the best pace for me.

Strother: Finnegan Shannon's work has appeared in galleries around the world.

Finnegan explains to me how disability informs their art.

Shannon: My background is in drawing and printmaking, but now I really work across all sorts of mediums and disciplines.

But the real core of my work is thinking about access.

I'm really interested in other disabled people as the primary audience for my work.

Some of my work is really rooted in, yeah, my own experience going to or trying to go to museums or galleries and feeling like I don't have what I need to be there and to participate in those spaces.

Strother: Give me some examples about how your condition affects your ability to appreciate art.

-A big one that seems like it's a solvable problem is the lack of seating and places to rest in galleries.

A big thing for me is like standing for long periods, walking for long periods.

Lots of kind of like chronic pain.

I basically realized that I could, like, work around that by making artwork that was also functional as seating, that it was a way of like kind of, um, shoehorning some seating into spaces where there might otherwise not be any.

Strother: Some of Finnegan's works are on display at Rutgers University's Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, including what some might consider an unusual installation.

Shannon: So I've been dreaming about putting a massaging chair in a gallery for, like, years.

I just feel so excited about the idea of not only offering a place to sit and pause in this space, but also for me, massage is a real tool for pain relief, and, like, having that on offer in the space felt really exciting.

Strother: Works by Finnegan and more than a dozen artists who identify as having a disability are featured in Smoke & Mirrors.

The University of Houston's Amanda Cachia is guest curator.

-This idea of like an illusion, so to speak.

I'm trying to play with the tension between concealing and revealing access.

So this idea of that, even though we might think that there's an illusion of access, in reality, most of the time, museums are not accessible for folks with disabilities.

The contemporary artists in this exhibition, they're actually using the materials of access as the conception for their art, the material for their art.

It's also to do with for people who are of short stature or in wheelchairs, that usually works of art are hung much higher on the wall, and so it's hard to be able to visually access it.

Thinking about Braille, for example, a large print font.

In contemporary art, we see a lot of film, we see a lot of video.

What about providing captions or ASL?

There's so many aspects to an exhibition design and the wayfinding experience that really need to be revealed to an audience.

-On a personal level, what have you learned about accessibility from the different artists whose works are portrayed here in Smoke & Mirrors?

-It's not really possible to meet the needs of everybody who have disabilities.

-There's no one size fits all solution.

-Correct?

-Strother: For accessibility?

-Yes, and that even half way through an exhibition, it's okay to adapt and make changes, the Zimmerli Art Museum staff decided to work with a disability community locally, and they recommended all the steps that the museum needed to take to be more accessible for its publics.

But disabled community also said, "And we want representation.

We want to see ourselves on the walls."

Strother: And on the floor.

Amanda, tell me about this exhibition.

What is it called?

Who is the artist?

And what is the artist trying to show us?

Yes.

This is a work by an Irish artist named Corban Walker.

Coburn has achondroplasia, which is the most common form of dwarfism.

He is 4'3" tall, the same height as myself, actually.

And so what he's created is this series of stanchions.

Stanchions, of course, are used in museums as a way for to keep people away from an object.

They're used to protect artwork.

But for people of short stature, like Corban and myself, they often, you know, really prohibit that experience and they really get in the way.

Strother: Another experience that isn't prohibited at Smoke & Mirrors is touching some of the art, like these 3-D sculptures that represent the movement of a mobility cane by Fayen D'Evie, who has low vision and dances with that aid in this video on display at the Zimmerli.

Cachia: We need to be able to touch the work for visitors with disabilities, but in fact, not just folks with disabilities that all of us could really benefit from having a more multi-sensorial approach to engaging with art.

Strother: And this is where I had my own multi-sensorial experience.

Man: The following is an audio description for various sculptures and works on paper created in 2022 by the artist Liza Sylvestre.

Strother: I have a low vision condition and have my own challenges viewing art.

These sculptures in Memorabilia are made of cochlear implant parts, devices that recreate sound and are used by some people who are deaf, including the artist.

But I wouldn't know any of this without the galleries apps' description track.

Man: These sculptures were 3-D printed from cochlear implant parts and Lego pieces, which were arranged to create decorative accents resembling tendrils, barnacles... Strother: Even though all of the works at Smoke & Mirrors have audio description, I asked Amanda Cachia to explain the significance of this piece by Finnegan Shannon.

Cachia: The clock is like looking at days of the week as opposed to the hours, because time operates differently for disabled people.

And it operates differently because of the way that our built environment has been designed without disabled people in mind.

Strother: That includes galleries as well as the streets of New York.

A day of the week clock hangs inside Finnegan Shannon's studio.

The artist says there was just something about this device that struck them when they first saw it.

Shannon: I often feel a kind of out of sync-ness with the pace of more normative time.

Like, another thread of my work is thinking about this big and I think ultimately unanswerable question of like, what is disability culture?

And there was something for me when I saw that clock where I was like, "This feels really resonant for me."