June 7, 2025–February 15, 2026
Visitors entering this exhibition of design by and for “Disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people” are confronted by Finnegan Shannon’s wooden bench. Painted bright blue with white outlines, the white text emblazoned on the bench’s back reads: “I NEED MORE TIME”; on its seat: “REST HERE IF YOU AGREE.” The exhibition begins with an invitation to act or not to act, implicating us in the process of resolving questions about access.
What follows this work from Shannon’s “Do you want us here or not” series (2018–ongoing) is a densely packed, multi-genre collage of objects of design and history. The connection between disability design and disability history is apt because much of what is now called Disability Arts is based in collective and/or individual histories of identity and exclusion. Throughout this overstuffed show, the curators seem pressed to include many different disabilities and design methods in a relatively small space. The result feels both too crowded and too incomplete.
The first section, titled “Visibility,” aims to show “how Disabled makers visualize and express their own identities across fashion, photography, demonstrations, graphic design and zine culture.” Both the advantages and problems of the show are here manifest. Right away, “design” is defined widely by blurring medium and function, as evidenced by the inclusion of Sky Cubacub’s colorful “gender-affirming” undergarments and, alongside them, T-shirts by various artists “reimagined as wearable placards” proclaiming political slogans such as “Access is Love” and “Piss on Pity.”
Though the displayed clothes, along with accompanying banners and photographs, can be understood as “visible” identifiers, it remains unclear what differentiates such “fashion” items not only from each other but also from other histories. Disabled people were not the only group to create such identifiers, as the displayed “Black Disabled Lives Matter” poster, based on designs from the Black Lives Matter movement, shows.
But what influences Sky Cubacub in the creation of their designs? Though the array of such diverse objects shows the breadth of disability design, what is missing is a deeper understanding of each object. To follow, if metaphorically, Finnegan Shannon’s text on their bench: there is little rest here.
This issue continues in the next section, “Tools,” which “explores the creativity of Disabled people in adapting and subverting designed objects to suit a greater diversity of access needs.” It includes Betsey and Sam Farber’s OXO Good Grips kitchen tools (1990) and Wayne Westerman’s TouchStream computer keyboard (2005), as well as some small adaptive sex aids.
An interesting and informative inclusion in this part of the show is a plastic straw, with an accompanying text titled “Why ‘Positive’ Change can Threaten Disability Rights,” which tells of the 2020 UK law that banned providing or selling single-use plastic straws. The text points out that for safety, hygiene, and practical reasons such as bendability, “single-use items are often indispensable for disabled users, despite their environmental impact.” Included is a quote from UK author, poet, and disability activist Penny Pepper: “Disabled people don’t want to have to put their own care above the environment—but it seems no one is considering the impact of future legislative changes on our wellbeing.” This is a call to action to design an environmentally compatible single-use straw.
The final section, “Living,” references the social model of disability in which “it is the political, environmental and behavioral barriers in society that disable people, rather than someone’s disability.” Here, the exhibition takes on the designers, city planners, and architects who “have made assumptions over who can occupy certain spaces and why,” arguing that, with this sentiment, “the world becomes a place to negotiate with, rather to live in.”
A relation to Finnegan Shannon’s bright blue bench is implicit in this section: the plush red mohair Squeeze Chair (Chaise Longue) (1998) by Wendy Jacob. Inspired by the author and scientist Temple Grandin, who identifies as autistic, the luxurious chair accounts for those whom “comforting sensory feedback” creates a more inviting seating/reclining option. Its prominent display begs for more history of the chair’s creation (such as its relationship to Grandin’s Squeeze Machine or “hug box” for administering deep-touch pressure to help calm those who need such sensory comfort), Jacobs’s relationship to Grandin, whether the chair is a one-off or can be reproduced. Once again, we are left to admire but not deeply understand this creation, an absence similar to that surrounding Sky Cubacub’s Rebirth Garments.
This final section is as diffuse as the show as a whole. What connects the Squeeze Chair to the McGonagle Reader, “an audio-assisted voting device to assist blind and low vision people to vote independently,” which is also displayed close by? Overall, how do the show’s objects specifically relate to the historical objects and texts that tell us about important events in disability history?
This important exhibition at a prominent museum is laudable in its goals, but these are not fully realized. Including 170 objects in a space too small to afford each object enough space, foregoing a deeper understanding of disability design, at times limits access. Though disabled visitors are offered free admission, another wheelchair-using visitor could not read the texts in a vitrine, while some objects, especially in the first section of the show, are placed too high on the wall to give more than a passing glance.
The curators seem to fear that something has been left out. A closing text titled “Label for Missing Objects” states: “This is an acknowledgment for all the objects that did not make it into this exhibition, but are just as important to the story of what it means to make, break, create and reinvent design as a disabled person.” But the show does not need more objects. What’s missing is a way of tying together a history of design as diverse as disability.
