'What was just hair raising was that I never saw their faces the whole time.
"We wanted to really push the slightly wacky reveals we're all going through," said Lehrer.Īfter completing this three-panel drawing, Riva Lehrer became very sick (not COVID related) and she was hospitalized for nine days. In the first panel, Pearl is in her bedroom, surrounded by dirty laundry. One of the portraits she did was of historian and professor of bioethics at Drexel University, Sharrona Pearl. Pearl studies the cultural history of face transplants and the history of physiognomy - the 19th century pseudoscientific practice of studying facial characteristics to make judgments about someone's character. So I wanted to do a portrait of that, of people, of the intimacy that was mediated by the screen."
"The most intimate experiences I was having were through this digital screen. She founded the Disability Visibility Project in 2014, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture. so I was completely incapacitated that way, too," she said.Ī Zoom portrait by Riva Lehrer of Alice Wong, a disability rights activist, writer, media maker, and consultant, based in San Francisco, California. "First of all, as a portraitist, feeling just a horrendous lack, but also realizing as a disabled person that because my body is unusual, I've always used my face, my expressions and my beliefs in order to do social judo or whatever martial art would most pertain to throwing someone in a different direction. When the pandemic began, Lehrer said she began experiencing intense "face hunger." A portrait of intimacy, mediated through a screen What's about to happen to you, if you're safe or not?" she told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed. "I still sort of have this memory of people constantly bending over me, and those faces are bringing your fate. Lehrer, a portrait artist and author of the memoir Golem Girl, has spina bifida, a condition where the spine and spinal column don't close before birth. "So I think faces and words and voices became the entire texture of the world for me." I didn't come home until I was at least two years old," she said. "It was the effect of growing up in the hospital. Riva Lehrer's fascination with the face began early. *Originally published on September 6, 2021.
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