BLOOMINGTON – Arts Midwest is thrilled to announce the inaugural winners of the Midwest Award for Artists with Disabilities.
This award, designed to support accessibility in the arts and celebrate the exceptional work of disabled Midwestern visual artists, has received an incredible response from the artistic community.
Over 200 artists applied to receive funds, and a panel of seven reviewers narrowed the pool to nine finalists from across the Midwest.
Larissa Danielle, of Bloomington, was one of the nine recipients of this award.
Larissa Danielle is a multi-media artist from the Washington D.C. metro area. Her work reflects her love of natural and found materials such as dried botanicals, wood, and textiles. Through her expressive usage of materials, scale, color, and form she explores the delicate conversations of sexual diversity and disability.
Her subject matter talks about the relationships and boundaries of disabled and diverse bodies within the world of intimacy, sexuality, sexual freedom, and self-love.
She holds an A.A. from Montgomery College, a B.A. in studio arts from the University of Maryland, and an MFA in sculpture from Indiana University.
Comments for Larissa Danielle:
Love, sex, and relationships are part of our human existence. It’s how we express our feelings towards who we desire. Romance, passion, and intimacy are all things that are part of our sexuality. The thing is, much of society cannot fathom the fact that sexuality also exists in the lives of people with disabilities. As an artist with a disability, I make work to change how society views the US.
I create work to make the unseen seen, to take the speculative and make it fact, to make us feel like we belong, I use plaster castings of my body to bring the diversity front and center and I use these forms to talk about a variety of sexual topics such as sex and gender, intimacy, vulnerability, pleasure, and sexual empowerment.
The intersections of sexuality and disability are rarely discussed in modern art culture. Our bodies are diverse in many forms and should be celebrated, not shamed. The work that I do opposes the conjecture put forth by society that disabled people don’t have sexual authority because sexuality and sexual depiction in human disability are often considered abnormal because of poor visibility in the arts and human disqualification in society.
