The Zoom Portraits: Alice Wong (sketch)
2020, mixed media on mylar, 14 x 17 in.
Collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum
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This was the first of the Zoom portraits, a project I started after Covid made having live subjects in my studio impossible. I followed it with a more extensive drawing (Alice Wong II), based on two months of conversation and remote sitting via laptop.​
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Zoom Portraits: Alice Wong
2020, graphite / colored pencil on paper, 25.25 x 31.25 in. (framed)
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The onset of the pandemic made having live subjects in my studio impossible. After months of struggle, I began to create portraits over Zoom. The border of Alice’s portrait depicts the edge of my laptop screen. At bottom is handwritten text taken from our conversations during our remote collaboration.
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Alice Wong is one of the most influential and powerful disability activists in the world today. Wong (she/her) is a disabled activist, writer, media maker, and consultant. Founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture created in 2014. Alice is the editor of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, an anthology of essays by disabled people and Disability Visibility: 17 First-Person Stories for Today an adapted version of the anthology for young readers. Her memoir, Year of the Tiger, came out in 2022. (Vintage Books, 2022).