Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
2022, acrylic on wood panel, 48" x 24"
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Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is a disability justice leader, bioethicist, teacher, and humanities scholar. Her 2016 editorial, Becoming Disabled, was the inaugural article in the ongoing weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities. She is co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities (forthcoming) and the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books. Her current project is Embracing Our Humanity: A Bioethics of Disability and Health.
In this work, Garland-Thomson holds a specimen vitrine that contains a fetus that presents with her own impairment, that of syndactyly. That is a condition in which the digits of the hands and feet become fused in utero, or fail to fully develop. The overall composition of the portrait is that of an hourglass, referring to the ways in which the morphology and functions of one’s body at birth may decree its eventual history.
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