{"id":189,"date":"2021-02-10T01:04:22","date_gmt":"2021-02-09T17:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=189"},"modified":"2021-02-15T01:32:02","modified_gmt":"2021-02-14T17:32:02","slug":"magnificent-monstrosity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/latest-news\/magnificent-monstrosity\/","title":{"rendered":"MAGNIFICENT MONSTROSITY"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1940s, artist Riva Lehrer\u2019s mother worked as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/\">a medical researcher<\/a> in the then nascent field of teratology. From the Greek\u00a0<em>teratos,\u00a0<\/em>or \u201cmonster,\u201d teratology is the study of birth defects. So in 1958, when Riva was born with spina bifida, which means \u201csplit spine,\u201d her mother knew better than to accept the medical mainstream\u2019s casual neglect. At the time, doctors didn\u2019t operate on babies with the condition, and 90 percent of them died before the age of two. Indeed, as the term \u201cteratology\u201d suggests, they saw these babies as monsters. Riva\u2019s mother insisted her daughter receive the medical interventions she needed to survive because she shared the radical views of her former boss\u2014Austrian physician Josef Warkany\u2014who believed disabled babies could grow up to live meaningful lives.<\/p>\n<p>Lehrer proudly and playfully identifies with monstrosity. That\u2019s why she gave her memoir the title\u00a0<em>Golem Girl<\/em>. The book details her childhood memories of school, family, and friends, punctuated with stories of the numerous summer breaks that she spent recovering from serious surgery. The portrait painter sees herself in Jewish folklore\u2019s humanoid lump of clay because, like the golem, her body \u201cwas built by human hands.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Today, Lehrer is a professor at both Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches figure drawing. At Northwestern\u2014where she instructs not art but med students\u2014Lehrer created a course called \u201cDrawing in a Jar.\u201d She came up with several assignments after seeing preserved spina bifida fetuses (\u201cmy ancestors,\u201d she calls them) at the M\u00fctter Museum in Philadelphia. In the class, she encourages future doctors to refer to their bottled subjects as \u201cindividuals,\u201d rather than \u201cspecimens.\u201d Then, she asks them to research the life of someone with the same condition.<\/p>\n<div class=\"post-content-image \/\/ \" style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<figure class=\"o-figure alignleft size-medium wp-image-1234583170 lrv-u-max-width-100p\">\n<div class=\"c-lazy-image \">\n<div class=\"lrv-a-crop-16x9\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"c-lazy-image__img lrv-u-background-color-grey-lightest lrv-u-width-100p lrv-u-display-block lrv-u-height-auto aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/NOMY-LAMM.jpg?w=400\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 87.5rem) 1000px, (min-width: 78.75rem) 681px, (min-width: 48rem) 450px, (max-width: 48rem) 250px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/NOMY-LAMM-e1612885105878.jpg 814w, https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/NOMY-LAMM-e1612885105878.jpg?resize=400,590 400w\" alt=\"A charcoal drawing of Nomy Lamm. Nomy, a white woman with dark long wavy hair appears to have plunged into the ocean. She floats underwater with her eyes and mouth open, while wearing a skirted swimsuit, fingerless gloves, and long striped socks. Her left leg is amputated below the knee and wears an outer prosthetic leg sleeve. Her upper arm has a large tattoo of a seal balancing its heart on its nose. A sea lion swims in front of her on its back. Bubbles blow out of both of their mouths, as if they are singing together. Surrounding Nomy and the sea lion are large fish. Rippled patterns of light dance along the ocean floor.\" width=\"400\" height=\"589\" data-lazy-loaded=\"true\" \/><\/div>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"c-figcaption lrv-u-font-size-12 lrv-u-flex lrv-u-flex-direction-column lrv-u-padding-tb-025\"><span class=\"lrv-u-font-size-14@desktop\">Riva Lehrer:\u00a0<em>Totems and Familiars: Nomy Lamm<\/em>, 2008, charcoal on paper, 44 by 30 inches.<\/span><cite class=\"lrv-u-text-transform-uppercase lrv-u-color-grey\"><cite class=\"lrv-u-text-transform-uppercase lrv-u-color-grey\">\u00a9 RIVA LEHRER. PRIVATE COLLECTION,<\/cite><\/cite>\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>In her <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/AtelierAuctionsg\">artwork<\/a>, in her courses, and in her memoir, Lehrer focuses on disabled peoples\u2019 rich range of experience. While medicine fixates on the body\u2019s imperfections, Lehrer teaches her students and her audience that disability is not simply biological: it\u2019s socially defined, too. And she manages to make this point with tact, grace, and humor: after all, disabled people are often experts at mitigating the discomfort their presence sometimes causes. In one moving chapter, she recalls a rare moment in which an adult showed optimism for her future. Lehrer attended the Randall J. Condon School for disabled children in Cincinnati, which was a radical institution for its time. Across the country, most disabled students learned basic literacy and industrial skills, and were not guaranteed a high school education. But at Condon, they were taught academics, which is not to say the school adequately prepared them for the real world: as Lehrer puts it, Condon \u201cwould rather have offered ROTC training than sex education.\u201d And in Home Economics, students learned survival skills\u2014how to heat up Campbell\u2019s soup\u2014rather than how \u201cto become wives and mothers,\u201d as most girls did in the 1960s. One day, though, the Home Ec teacher surprised her class: they were going to learn to make an elaborate dessert, baked Alaska! Not knowing the dish had gone out of fashion a decade before she was born, Lehrer was \u201cstupefied\u201d: an adult imagined that she and her peers might grow up to one day host fancy soirees. It was a formative moment.<\/p>\n<p>Today, Lehrer creates portraits of disabled people\u2014hosting parties, falling in love, making art\u2014chronicling the ingenuity and interdependence that impairment engenders. Her self-portraits have appeared on the covers of notable books like Lauren Berlant\u2019s widely read\u00a0<em>Cruel Optimism\u00a0<\/em>(2011) and Tobin Siebers\u2019s\u00a0<em>Disability Theory\u00a0<\/em>(2008). In 1997 Lehrer began a series of portraits depicting disabled people in the arts and academia. Titled \u201cCircle Stories,\u201d the series comprises portraits that are realistically rendered, yet incorporate symbols that help tell the stories of their subjects.<\/p>\n<div class=\"post-content-image \/\/ \" style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<figure class=\"o-figure alignleft size-medium wp-image-1234583168 lrv-u-max-width-100p\">\n<div class=\"c-lazy-image \">\n<div class=\"lrv-a-crop-16x9\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"c-lazy-image__img lrv-u-background-color-grey-lightest lrv-u-width-100p lrv-u-display-block lrv-u-height-auto aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/BRIAN-ZIMMERMAN.jpg?w=400\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 87.5rem) 1000px, (min-width: 78.75rem) 681px, (min-width: 48rem) 450px, (max-width: 48rem) 250px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/BRIAN-ZIMMERMAN-e1612885091579.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/BRIAN-ZIMMERMAN-e1612885091579.jpg?resize=400,247 400w\" alt=\"A portrait of Brian Zimmerman in charcoal on paper. Brian is a white man with short light-brown curly hair. He lays on his side in the nude. An open book is on the ground under his hands. Brian\u2019s left leg is amputated below the knee and wears a prosthetic leg. Six various cats of different breeds surround him \u2013 one cuddles up into his hairy chest while another pounces toward him from behind. The other cats either watch on or mind their own business.\" width=\"400\" height=\"247\" data-lazy-loaded=\"true\" \/><\/div>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"c-figcaption lrv-u-font-size-12 lrv-u-flex lrv-u-flex-direction-column lrv-u-padding-tb-025\"><span class=\"lrv-u-font-size-14@desktop\">Riva Lehrer:\u00a0<em>Circle Stories: Brian Zimmerman<\/em>, 2000, charcoal on paper, 18 by 36 inches.<\/span><cite class=\"lrv-u-text-transform-uppercase lrv-u-color-grey\"><cite class=\"lrv-u-text-transform-uppercase lrv-u-color-grey\">\u00a9 RIVA LEHRER. PRIVATE COLLECTION,<\/cite><\/cite>\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>Throughout, Lehrer shows how Western medicine and concepts of beauty are sometimes one and the same. Some of the \u201ccures\u201d doctors prescribed were not meant to relieve pain, but to help her conform her body to a narrow norm. She had gall bladder surgery because she would have died without it. But she wonders whether surgeries meant to \u201ccorrect\u201d her gait were simply attempts to make her look less monsterlike in the eyes of the nondisabled. How different, Lehrer wonders provocatively, were these sorts of treatments from the one elective surgery she volunteered to undergo, what she calls \u201cthe great milestone of Jewish womanhood\u201d\u2014her nose job.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Source\uff1ahttps:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n<div id=\"adm-inline-article-ad-1\" class=\"admz\">\n<div class=\"adma boomerang\" data-device=\"Desktop\" data-width=\"1\">\n<div class=\"pmc-adm-boomerang-pub-div ad-text\">\n<div id=\"gpt-dsk-tab-aia-mid-article1-uid0\" class=\"adw-1 adh-1\" data-is-adhesion-ad=\"\" data-google-query-id=\"CPWUu-yi3e4CFQ8ZvAoddsEP8w\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1940s, artist Riva Lehrer\u2019s mother worked as a medical researcher in the then nascent field of teratology. From the Greek\u00a0teratos,\u00a0or \u201cmonster,\u201d teratology is the study of birth defects. So in 1958, when Riva was born with spina bifida, which means \u201csplit spine,\u201d her mother knew better than to accept the medical mainstream\u2019s casual [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,3,49],"tags":[58,45,59],"class_list":{"0":"post-189","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-gallery","9":"category-latest-news","10":"category-north-america","11":"tag-art-in-america","12":"tag-artwork","13":"tag-magnificent-monstrosity"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>MAGNIFICENT MONSTROSITY - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In her moving memoir Golem Girl, the disabled portrait painter Riva Lehrer reclaims monstrosity.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/latest-news\/magnificent-monstrosity\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"MAGNIFICENT MONSTROSITY - 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