♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
The series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Laura Brody, an artist who sculpts
the human body and its vehicles.
She is the founder of Opulent Mobility, a series of exhibits that reimagine
disability as opulent and powerful.
You can find the resources mentioned by Laura Brody during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to this new episode.
I am today with Laura Brody.
Thank you, Laura, for being here.
Thank you.
Laura is someone who does a lot of work in sculpting
for the human body and its vehicle, which I really love.
You're the founder of an organization called Opulence Mobility,
which is actually a series of exhibits.
You're going to talk about that, I guess.
Absolutely.
And thank you so much for inviting me.
This is wonderful.
I'm hailing from Monrovia, California, which is -
if you know California at all, it's east of Pasadena.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
This is wonderful.
I'm so excited that you've been setting up these talks with people.
What a great idea.
It's a great journey, and it's very interesting to be able to talk about
arts and accessibility in the arts with so many people all over the world.
It's great.
Thank you for taking the time to chat with us.
Absolutely.
No, that's wonderful.
It's such an exciting thing to talk about, too.
Something that I think we need more conversations about it.
Absolutely, yes.
Can you tell a little bit about your background, where it all
started, your studies, everything?
Absolutely.
What I am, and have been anyway, professionally, is a costume person.
So I have made and designed costumes and worked on them
for many, many, many years.
And that's for film and television and dance and theater
and anybody who needs a costume.
But I got excited and interested in doing work with disability art.
That came from a different place.
I I'd always worked with people who had certain forms of disabilities,
but it didn't spend as much time with it until a former partner had a stroke, and
I got much closer to adaptive equipment.
He was going through physical therapy for a stroke.
And I saw at the same time when I was dropping him off, an 85-year-old man and
a four-year-old girl who are doing the same type of therapy for the same reason.
And you don't have to hit me with a head - over the head. I get it.
Look, it can happen to anybody at any time for any reason.
But it just didn't seem right that the equipment looked as terrible as it did.
And it really just seemed insultingly ugly.
It was like the cheapest, most awful aluminum stuff, and it didn't
seem to even work that well.
The crutches and the walkers and the rest of it were - There has to be a better way.
We can figure something else out.
And didn't do anything with that for a while until much later, a friend
of mine and really big changes of life.
But a friend of mine had a wheelchair that he wasn't using
and offered it to me to redo as a throne.
And I did it like an Edwardian throne and potted it up,
and it was glorious and beautiful, and almost threw him out on the floor
because I didn't understand about the padding that I needed to put in,
that it threw off his balance too much.
And that was not my intention at all.
But okay, there's so much more I need to learn about this.
Maybe I don't start with redesigning people's equipment
before I learn a lot more.
But I also started trying to find places to share the work.
And it was so tricky and hard find places that were accessible.
So to even bring...
It didn't feel right to bring a wheelchair
to a place where somebody in a wheelchair can't get to.
I started researching it and realizing there were a lot of designs for equipment
that were interesting, and none of them were going out on the market.
So I'm like, What is happening?
There is so much more.
It just felt like I just scratch the surface.
And I thought, okay, I can't be the only one thinking about it.
And maybe I can put on a show because I'm a collaborative artist at heart,
spent a lot of time working in theater, and thought, Okay, I'll find
some other artists who are interested in this topic about reimagining disability.
And I tried to put on a show, and I figured, how hard could it be?
Which was the understatement of the century.
But over the years, Opulent Mobility, which is what I've called this series
of exhibits, asks artists to re-imagine disability as opulent and powerful.
And because I didn't ever specify what type of disability when people got
involved, it's covered everything, really, from mental health issues,
mobility issues, eyesight, hearing, you name it,
and just looking at it in new ways or approaching it in new ways.
And my own artwork has changed, certainly as I've been working more
on my own chronic health issues and invisible disabilities.
It's almost 10 years now.
It's almost amazing to me that that's happened.
I've been doing it for 10 years.
When did it start exactly?
I thought it was 2013.
2013 was the first exhibit.
I actually did the very first piece.
I started in 2009, but I didn't really start putting things together.
It took about a year to get the first show because I just wanted a space
that was really accessible, and I had my heart set on the space,
and they didn't want to talk to me.
So I had to bug them so much.
And eventually, I found out that they were upset because of all the money they
had spent making the place accessible.
Okay, fine.
But eventually, they let me in.
And then through the years, I've been finding other places to share the work
and really finding wonderful artists and such exciting work, but also finding
yet more places that are not accessible.
It's a real challenge.
Would it be possible for you to share these places with us
where you did actually these shows that were accessible to the audience, but also
the artist, so that they can exhibit?
Yes.
I've done that, making it accessible to the audience and the artist by starting
and doing things online actually made an enormous amount of difference.
And by adding in art descriptions.
The second exhibit I did was in 2015, and that was at Cal State (California State University), Northbridge,
and most community colleges are mandated to be accessible.
It's a good space if you can get it.
That is frequently a challenge to get into the gallery spaces unless you know a lot
of people or already work at the school.
But that was one of the first places where I ran into a really fine
art describer who was excited by the show that I was doing and offered to...
Because I was writing my own art descriptions,
but I didn't really know how to do it.
And she offered to look over what I had done and make corrections.
It was so gracious and wonderful, but to make things more accessible
for blind and low vision people. And ever since then, I've been working with her.
She's amazing. Kari Grossman, thank you.
That's awesome.
She works out of a place called Audio Eyes.
So one of the things that I've been doing each time is trying to find other ways
to make it more accessible.
Doing them and putting everything up online has made a big difference.
I also started to add in a voiceover of some of the descriptions as well.
so you get another element and much more detailed art descriptions.
So you hopefully get the experience of really looking at the art
and getting more involved with it.
2017, that was the next one after that, and that one was online.
2018, I did a place called Fimula Arts in Hollywood, and one of the few rental
spaces that you find that had some accessibility that I could afford.
That is also a challenge.
Accessibility in terms of funding is always a challenge, too.
Other places, I have done one at a brewery in 2021.
2020 was online like everything was.
2022 was also at a community college This one was over in Antelope Valley.
And this last one was at my studio space downtown of Los Angeles, and that's where
the upcoming one will be as well.
So I just start keeping my eyes and ears filled
for accessible spaces wherever I can.
And hopefully for people that you can partner with.
I did one in 2019 with a disability arts day program
called Arts Unbound in New Jersey.
But sadly, that is no more.
I guess with ADA and the laws that are voted, there will be more
and more spaces where we can physically welcome some people.
But also the importance of continuing to do it hybrid
with the online possibilities, like you said, captions and transcripts
and visual descriptions, things like that, that are very important and that are not
always feasible in physical exhibitions.
Absolutely. It has made an enormous difference.
Over the past three years, what I've been doing,
because I started working with a deaf artist, I've been incorporating ASL,
making sure more things are captioned and correctly captioned,
which is a real issue because automatic captioning is terrible.
I mean, of course it is.
That's almost impossible for that to do well.
I'm impressed that it does as well as it can, but correcting that,
trying to make sure that there's more information.
The most recent exhibit, I did individual artist interviews
because all of the artists were saying, We need a little more time.
It was lovely to be able to take that time and then have those recorded
and add ASL to them as well.
I'm assuming...
I'd love to be able to make it more accessible in so many ways
and to do it in so many different languages, and I'm doing it bit by bit.
I would like to come back to your own work.
Yes.
Is it possible to tell us about your artistic process when you create a piece,
the material that you're using, the ideas that come to you when you see
a mobility aid or a mobility device?
Can you talk about that?
Absolutely.
I can talk about both some of the ones that I just started with
and then also the thing that I'm most recently working on.
But the ones that were more about specifically the devices
that started with, okay, I want to make this walker into something.
There's a piece I have called Le Flâneur, which is...
It's like a mobile Victorian bath house, really, with a parasol
and a gramophone horn that you could also use as an ear horn, and cowhorns in the front,
and drapery is in a silver platter.
But I'll start taking these pieces and collecting the bits.
Easily, 85 % of the material that I use is repurposed or found objects,
old stuff, and then redressed, I guess you could say.
I will take old materials, a lot of old tablecloths and drapery materials,
and then turn them into the new pieces.
The Jazzy Peacock scooter was from a mobility scooter that was found
on the side of the road.
We refurbished it, and I I turned it essentially into an Art Nouveau Peacock.
But the thing that I find really delightful
about doing these that is so different from what I had been doing professionally
is that I can take my time.
I can really devote time to them.
Most recent piece took three years.
It, of course, not the only thing I was doing, but to really let it grow
and to let that process happen each time.
When I'm doing costumes for stage and screen, there is not that luxury.
The deadline is now, now, now, now, now.
So that happens really quickly.
These I really get to take time, and that is a lovely thing to do.
The most recent pieces I've been doing are really focusing a little bit more
on some of my own chronic health issues.
So the Fairy Melusine, which is a more recent one,
that was the one that took three years, has a spine made out of all the supplement
bottles that I've been using to help keep myself healthy with
thyroid issues and menopause and many other things,
and is stuffed with clean plastic waste.
And I've built portals into it so you can actually see portions of the innards.
And a lot of her is also made with old prom dresses.
I try to pick things that are not only what I like or what works
pretty wise, but something that has meaning for the work as well.
You also created a podcast about lectures that is called Genius Teatime?
Yes, that has been so fun and such a delight.
That was something that I originally started with a friend
and colleague, Pamela Samuelson.
She runs something called Embody Work LA.
But since then, it's become mine.
What we found is that we knew a lot of people who
had really fascinating stories and were very knowledgeable and passionate
about many different topics.
Well, how about we bring you in and let's talk about that.
So it's done with a suggested donation each time, and that's -
any donations are split into thirds.
So a third will go to the speaker, a third will go to their charity or mutual aid
of choice, and then the rest of it will go to Opulent Mobility,
hopefully to get more ASL interpretations.
So sometimes that brings in money, sometimes it doesn't.
That just happens.
But I'm finding just wonderful people.
A couple of the talks have been ASL interpreted, and try to go through and
caption them, and I'm now going through and putting them all up on Substack.
I don't know if you know of that, and doing transcripts, edited transcripts,
slowly, because I'm one person.
I'm trying to find funding to get to pay me to do that.
And that's a very important point is that when you create something that needs to
be active and lively and maintained, you also have to open it to all audiences.
This takes time, energy...
So much, as you know.
And that's because there's so many different topics, literally ranging
from occultist ritual theater in the 1900s to today to BDSM in
the disability community and the history of beatboxing and real estate.
It's not like there's one audience for all of it, but there probably
will be people for each thing.
So I've been archiving the talks.
I really also wanted to create accessible programming.
There's a lot up on YouTube.
A lot of the captions are terrible, as you know.
And so putting up things that you could actually follow along is great.
And they're fascinating people.
The first speaker we had, an Indigenous woman talking about the regenerative
farming techniques of the Chumash and how it could help with climate catastrophy.
Just fascinating person.
I'm looking forward to more.
Do you get to invite some of the people you find with Opulent Mobility?
Yes.
Just recently, I brought in Andrea Jennings, who is somebody
that I'd met through a couple of Disability Arts Programmings, but
she's just recently started a YouTube...
No, it's a Pasadena Media TV show about embracing accessibility
all over, which is very cool.
I'll share the link with you later because I don't remember the name right offhand.
And also Ellice Patterson, who is the founder of Abilities Dance Boston,
who I know because she reached out to me about designing costumes for
her dancers and their devices, their wheelchairs, walkers, and crutches.
So very neat.
Anthony Tessler, who is my co-curator, has also given a spot.
I'm bringing people pretty regularly.
I'm interested in, hopefully more people will be, and people will learn about
disability access and disability arts as well, along with the rest of things.
Do you continue doing costumes in TV and films and theater?
Right now, I've not been.
For the past year, because the entertainment industry's been having some
major strikes, and those are now over.
But all of the, what they call the below the line people,
which is what I am part of, the people who actually make everything happen,
are negotiating their contracts.
And I'm not expecting very much.
I've essentially been out of that type of work for a year.
What I chose to do during this time was really focus on finding grants
and funding and making Opulent Mobility more of a going concern, because
in order for this to really grow, it needs to be more funded.
So first off, because it's a full-time job, and there are so many
full-time jobs I could do, And I want to be able to pay people.
I've been hiring some of the disabled artists to work with me.
I would like to continue to do that. Thank you.
I would like to make sure that I can bring in interpreters - bring in deaf artists
and have interpretation that is suited to them so that they can really
be part of the show.
And that costs.
Each thing costs.
So I'm finding things, and I'm crossing my fingers for more.
And I'm also working on some proposals for different forms of social practice art,
setting up, mending circles with different communities, and making
those as accessible as I can as as well.
Let's see if it will work.
We got to try.
Do you have any future opportunities
that will happen with Opulent Mobility to share with us?
Yes, absolutely.
There are two retrospective shows that are coming up.
Those are already have people chosen for them.
One of those will be in September at University of Southern California at their Hoyt Gallery.
The other one will be at Brand Library in spring of next year.
But this year, the deadline is August 31st.
Please submit your work that reimagines disability as opulent and powerful.
We want your art that celebrates disability instead
of looking at it as something to fear or ignore or look away from.
That's awesome. We will post all these links to ArtsAbly's website.
Yes, that will be awesome.
And encourage everybody to publish - to submit, sorry, to submit somewhere.
Do it, do it.
I would love to see - One of the things that people should know that we work regularly
with international artists, and it is always possible to send digital files.
So you don't have to worry.
That's another accessibility feature I like to add, that if you
send us the file, I can have it printed and framed, or we can show
the video or whatever it is.
And that is a way that you can share your work without
having to deal with shipping costs.
Because that can be very expensive.
If you are, say, coming from France or coming from England or India was one
of the artists more recently, these are ways you can join.
Thank you.
This is a good segue to my next question, which is really about what it
means for you to work in a field that promotes and that encourages
accessibility in the arts.
I just feel it's necessary.
Absolutely, without a doubt, necessary.
I'm also constantly surprised at how little attention is paid to it.
This literally benefits all of us.
How many people are benefiting from captions all the time now?
Why not have more of that?
Why not have them work better?
It feels to me like when you're doing things,
it may not be possible to make it accessible perfectly to everyone,
but there are ways to try, and there are ways to really make
an effort to make sure that everybody gets to experience it or
that more people get to.
So as best as I can, hopefully doing a little better each time.
And that it means a great deal to me that other people really care about this, too,
that this is important, because it is.
Especially today where we have this notion of universal design
that can be applied to everything, like buildings, arts, creation, design
of objects, design of devices.
Yeah, I have mixed feelings about universal design.
Certainly, that can be incredibly important and helpful in, say,
your building designs or making things more accessible in other ways, but also
acknowledging we're individuals and that we all have different needs
and wants and desires and style.
I don't expect you to have - somebody who, say, really, really likes jazz music
is going to necessarily love Norwegian death metal, for example.
So why would you have the same wheelchair?
Why would you have the same design for everything?
That doesn't make sense.
But I think there are also ways that we can do things more sustainably.
I think there's so much we can work on that also acknowledges real need.
Yes, but I also think that this universal design concept is not always about
seeing or hearing things in the same way.
It's about a variety - For example, in arts, I can see it when
there is someone who sees the piece of art, can experience it,
but someone who can touch it, can experience it,
and someone who can benefit from visual description can experience it.
Absolutely.
That is so important.
This is a universal design thinking in the way that everybody could experience it,
not necessarily appreciate it the same way because we all have different needs
and likes, but there are options, and that's what I like in that concept.
I love that.
I think that's so important, and that I would love to do more tactile work.
I've actually been hearing more about people who are doing olfactory designs.
That's amazing.
So, scent. And having that - although for some people, that would be terrible.
It will be really...
Figuring out your audiences is always tricky.
But I think there are really great possibilities.
Yes.
It's also an artistic exploration of all these possibilities that can be fun.
Absolutely.
How neat is that?
Because those things will affect your mood and they will affect just,
I don't know, so many aspects of it. It's wonderful.
Why wouldn't you want to play?
Yes. Wow.
There are so many possibilities right now.
It's like, Okay, what should we do in the next exhibition?
I know it was some things.
I was actually pretty excited in the year before last,
I put the Fairy Melusine in a show, and a friend of mine who's a perfumer
created a custom scent for her.
That was the coolest thing.
How neat, right?
Because she is based on a real mythical figure who might also have been a queen.
Definitions are squishy, but she might have been the person
who first brought the green bean the "haricot vert" to France.
She came up with this lilies of the valley and green pea scent, which is amazing.
Wow, that's very good. That's a good idea.
Just what a neat way to incorporate different senses into the design.
Absolutely. That's great.
I would like to do that again.
Maybe you will I have an artist who will submit at the next call,
and you will have a surprise.
Yes, I might.
Submit your custom scent.
That'll be so interesting.
I will have to come and see that in person and smell that in person.
I don't think that there's a way to do that virtually.
That would be very interesting, but I think you'd have to send samples
through the mail or something.
There are always ways.
That's the one thing I found that has kept me doing this
over and over again, because both with my own artwork and with Opulent Mobility
and the associated programming, because There is always another arena to explore.
There's more around each corner, and there's so much more to learn each time.
And I really love that.
Thank you for sharing that. That's great.
You're welcome. That's exciting.
Yes.
I have a last question for you, which is about collaborations and meeting people
and maybe having someone in mind or someone close to your work who really
pushed you or really encouraged you to do whatever you're doing right now.
If you had one or two people in mind, who would it be and why?
When I very, very first started doing this, I kept trying to find other people
who were doing anything similar at all.
And I was not finding a lot of people, certainly not in 2009.
But when I first heard about the Alternative Limb Project,
it was like, this might be somebody who has a kindred spirit.
So I'm sure I'm getting this wrong.
Sophie de Oliveira Barata, I think, who's been developing not only incredibly
realistic prosthetics that look like real feet,
but also ones that have arms with snakes crawling in and out and around
that are crystallized with light poking through them.
One of them was just an enormous spike.
They're astonishing and works of art in and of themselves.
I'm looking at it like, Okay, Okay.
Somebody else is thinking about this.
I reached out to her, and she got back to me, which was amazing.
I think she had been on a bunch of different news medias,
and I had no expectations of hearing back from this person.
She got back to me and suggested that I get in touch with Priscilla Sutton
out in Australia, who was doing Spare Parts, which was a series
of exhibits that had people take, use prosthetic limbs and turn them into art.
And I worked with Priscilla for a couple of exhibits, which was amazing.
It was a really wonderful leap into it and recognizing that maybe
this was really odd and original, but I wasn't the only one.
Of course, there's also Anthony Tusler, who's my co-curator, who helped keep me
in the loop on all things disability history and keeps it honest.
I'm not always as up on some of the tropes that might seem a little more offensive.
I tried to be very conscious of it, but I don't always know.
So he is really good at making sure that everything is on the up and up.
And he's a star in the disability world.
And he's so fun to curate with.
So we'll have a lot of talks and he's just really fun and goofy about it.
But we're also very uncensored
when we talk together.
So it's nice to have that.
And it's really fun.
We also don't have the same taste in art at all.
So sometimes it's like, really?
You want that one?
How did you meet?
He reached out to me after the 2013 one.
He put in a couple of pieces or submitted a piece, and he was a month after
the deadline or something like that.
I'm like, Oh, I've already published everything, but maybe
we can work together.
And then just kept keeping in touch.
I asked him to co-curate the next one in 2015,
and we've been working together since.
So that's been really cool. Very nice.
Yeah. He's a great guy.
Thank you so much for this conversation.
Thank you.
I'm so happy to do this.
Thank you for reaching out.
You're very welcome.
It has been a pleasure to share that.
Maybe you have a last word of advice to all the artists who are listening
to us and who are like, Maybe I should submit a piece, maybe not.
I'm going to absolutely say yes.
One of the things I really like to do with artists, if it doesn't
work with a theme, I will tell you.
I will also maybe suggest other places where you could try to submit your work.
I won't bite, I promise, but it's absolutely worth trying.
And you may have ideas that I've never thought of.
That happens for me every single year.
I am wonderfully surprised about some of the work that comes in.
And please, please share it.
We want to share your work with the world.
Come on.
Well, all the best for everything.
And to you. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
And I hope I can come in person one day and really see
the great work you're doing live.
That would be wonderful.
Thank you. Have a good day. And to you.
Bye.
♪ Closing theme music ♪
Bye.