Prosthetics, adaptive technologies, and accessible architecture all bridge the gaps between our many bodies and the built world, while wheelchair dance and other disability artworks question the inheritance of "normal." In this talk, Sara Hendren will uncover the surprising and generative places where disability shows up in artifacts of all kinds, helping us to ask: What is the future of the body, assisted by its many tools and extensions? How does disability shape all our lives, and the meaning we make in dependence?

Hendren is CIA's 2024–25 Bickford Visiting Artist. The Bickford Visiting Artist Endowment Fund was established by George P. Bickford in 1962 and is used to bring distinguished artists to the College to supplement the regular instructional program. This year's Bickford Visiting Artist grantee is Drawing Assistant Professor Amber Kempthorn.

Hendren's lecture caps a semester of intra-departmental collaborations related to themes grounded in her recent book, What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World. Programming organized by CIA faculty, Reinberger Gallery and the Jane B. Nord Center for Teaching + Learning included reading groups, exhibitions, course connections, student-led programs and teaching workshops.

What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World (Penguin Random House) will be available for purchase at CIA before and after Hendren’s talk courtesy of Cleveland Heights-based bookstore Mac’s Backs.

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher and writer who teaches design for disability at Olin College of Engineering. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt design museum; her writing and design work have been featured in The New York Times and Fast Company and on NPR. Hendren has been a fellow at New America and the Carey Institute for Global Good. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Photo credit: Leise Jones

Sara Hendren: "Cyborgs, Misfits, and Makers: Art, Design, and the Future of the Human Body" is supported in part by the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

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