The Fort Wayne Museum of Art is pleased to announce a trio of exhibitions that feature to the work of artists who have forthrightly addressed, in varying ways, the effects of physical and mental disability on the creation of art. The exhibits will be on display March 11-June 11, 2017 and include two solo exhibitions by contemporary photographers working in the United States and an exhibit of artists from the FWMoA permanent collection.

Sharon, the photographic story of a father’s experiences raising his severely disabled daughter, meticulously traces the profound struggles internationally-acclaimed contemporary photographer Leon Borensztein faced while raising Sharon. Exhibited together for the very first time, this collection of more than 40 black and white photographic prints communicates the strength of Sharon’s spirit and invites us to consider the power of unremitting love.

The second exhibition, Expressions of Existence, will take its cue from art history and from the FWMoA permanent collection as it investigates the work and careers of artists throughout history who have explored the ways in which their disabilities have affected their creative work. The work in this exhibit, which spans the years 1797 to 2013, is not a display of disability but an expression of all lives which are at once comparable and contrastable—synchronous but separate. This exhibition includes works by Jackson Pollock, Wesley Neal Rasko, Marie Laurencin, Chuck Close, Ginny Martin Ruffner, Andy Warhol, and Francisco Goya, among others. This exhibition’s didactic materials will be supplemented by Braille text.

Finally, this series will conclude with an exhibit of the work of Timothy Archibald and his son Eli, who is autistic. ECHOLILIA is an eleven-image curation from a larger body of work that was published in the identically titled book (Echo Press, San Francisco, CA, 2010. 70 pp., 43 color plates). Taken at their home in