Disabled Women Make History (and Art) 2026 Virtual Artists Gallery

Click on the picture of the artwork to learn more about the artist and their piece in their own words.

Join us for a celebration of our virtual artists and virtual gallery walk on July 29th on Zoom.

The art piece is a texture piece of frida khalo in a jungle. I used felt (wool) and stabbed it with a needle into canvas. I used bold colors for the design. I used a deep red color for her top and different shades of greens for the leaves. I combined animals to make a albrijes (Mexican spirit animals). I used a monkey for the head of one of the animals and a penguin for its body. For the other animal I mixed together a panther for the head and a snow leopard for its body.

Frida in felt by Kelsey Haase

Austin, Texas.
I took clay ceramics in high school and fell in love, expanding my learning into college. A block of wet clay allows me to be free and experiment. Many times, the clay leads me in directions I never thought about. I also like the physicalness it requires to make beautiful things. I use every part of my body, so it becomes a therapeutic workout. Clay is very forgiving. If you make a mistake, it is typically easy to fix. I also like to experiment with glazes in different colors and textures. It is always a mystery when it comes out of the kiln.
I have been inspired by the works of Frida Kahlo, and Latin American art in general. Much of Latin art has a spiritual basis. For example, the alibrijes that I make are spirit animals in Mexican culture. It is fun to think of taking the parts of different animals and blending them into one being. Also, they aren’t very common, so it’s always entertaining to watch people try to guess what animal parts I used. I also love the use of bright color and unusual textures. Some of my turquoise work is similar to Aztec art, and many of my bowls use designs based in Aztec and Mayan cultures.
Clay can be intimidating to some people, but many who try it enjoy the feel and like to beat it to submission. There is no limit to its creativity, and I’d like to teach others how to explore their ideas through the medium.

A square mixed media portrait shows the face and shoulders of a woman emerging from a dark textured background. Her face is divided by intricate black lines into irregular shapes resembling stained glass, veins, or fractured stone. Warm gold and peach tones cover the left side of the face, while pale white and gray tones dominate the right. Thin silver wires curve outward and across the surface, creating depth and shadow. The woman faces forward with a calm, direct expression, surrounded by a quiet atmosphere of tension, solitude, and stillness.

BOUNDARIES by Nichole Montgomery

Tulsa, Oklahoma
BOUNDARIES explores solitude as a place of clarity and self possession. Created through her NeuroLines mark making process, the layered surface carries memory, endurance, and private transformation across the figure. Surrounded by darkness and restrained light, the work reflects identity formed beyond expectation, approval, or social demand.

More: nicholemontgomery.com

An artist stands on a sunlit city sidewalk in front of a bookstore, holding a large, yellow poster designed to mimic a popular instructional book cover. The poster is titled "Understanding Deafness for Dummies" by Syra, featuring the iconic black-and-yellow branding and a cartoon character. Text on the poster reads, "Not everyone wants to be fixed," and "A reference for the rest of us!" The artist wears a structured black blazer adorned with small white heart patterns and colorful heels, posing with a serious expression to emphasize the piece's message of social advocacy.

Understanding Deafness for Dummies by Syra

Toronto, Ontario
This piece, part of a series of "protest art," uses the familiar visual language of instructional manuals to confront systemic misconceptions surrounding disability. By subverting a recognizable pop-culture format, the work challenges the medical model of deafness and advocates for a shift toward societal accessibility and genuine understanding. It serves as both a critique of institutional barriers and a call for a more inclusive, caring world.

Painting of two tuxedo (ie black and white) cats. The one on the left is lying down and turning her head around to the camera, with her big yellow eyes in a funny stunned expression. The cat on the right is sitting and has a more relaxed look to her face and green eyes.

Piper and Nori by Lauren Bendik

Los Angeles, California
I’m a pet-sitter and these are a couple of my cat clients, Piper and Nori. I painted them digitally on my ipad using Procreate, spending over 13 hours and 45,000 ‘brush’ strokes. Besides my physical disability, Spina Bifida, I deal with mental health issues like anxiety and derealization. Spending time with animals is therapeutic for me, and it is fulfilling to make art as a tribute to them.

In a orange burgandy, surreal desert, a room with only 2 walls and a window, is cracking from the bomb erupting outside the window with a mushroom cloud. two paper airplanes circle overhead as a woman sits in a wheelchair with a clock for a wheel and paints a picture of 3 swirling peace lilies at an easel. the trees around her are cut short and the one in the corner closest to the viewer has been turned into a birthday cake. a river runs from the crack in the wall under the wheelchair and out into the desert where it twists and turns and cracks.

How Can I Paint Peace Lillies, When There's War? By: Sky Dai

This self portrait is inspired by the surrealist art movement, war and genocide at the hands of the US government, and the ongoing threat of climate change. In a dream, I was shown a future of extreme desertification. With the state of the world, when I go into my studio I sometimes feel stuck unsure of how to focus on painting when there's so much unjust violence and destruction going on around me.

Dividing Without Consent by Swetlana Nikitenko

Berlin, Germany
|This work translates microscopic cell division into a soft, tactile form, contrasting scientific detachment with care and time. The piece reflects on questions of bodily autonomy, visibility, and control. It asks what it means when a body continues to exist beyond personal agency. In the context of disability, the work connects to experiences of medical systems where bodies are often examined, defined, or overlooked without full understanding or consent.

Video description: A textile artwork made from crochet in soft pastel pink and bright red yarn. In the center are two connected red organic forms resembling dividing cells or internal body structures. Red branching lines extend outward across a pale pink background, suggesting blood vessels, nerves, or cellular growth. The handmade texture is highly visible, creating a contrast between soft craft materials and themes of biology, medical research, and bodily transformation.

See more of Swetlana's work on instagram at @stricktdagegen

The image is a painting of a child with a joyful expression, standing inside a room. The child is wearing oversized white sneakers, grey pants with large red stars, and a large black jacket. The child’s head is tilted back with mouth open as if laughing or shouting. The background features a bright blue wall and a brown window frame. On the wall, there's a small piece of paper with a drawing and the words “KIDZ RULEZ” in childlike handwriting. The painting employs bold colors and textured surfaces, with swirling patterns visible on the jacket and the background wall.

In Someone Else's Shoes by DaNice D Marshall

Braintree, Massachusetts
In 2016, a severe illness left me with lung damage, hearing loss and unable to walk without a cane. I started painting, mostly to watch the paint dry and eventually my paintings evolved to Narrative Art. I wanted to show the connectedness of people, those with disability and those without, in the form of empathy.

I hope my art makes you smile a little bit, at least on the inside.

A picture of an art installation of a black metal grid with white balloons tied to it with 250 metal spoons tangled together, hanging on fishing line from the grid. An LED light rope is looping down throughout the balloons and tangles of spoons.

The Weight of Spoons by Alexis Neumann

Long Beach, California
“The Weight of Spoons” is an installation using 250+ found metal spoons, fishing line, LED neon rope, metal grid, and balloons to visualize the compounding, overwhelming, ‘invisible’ tolls that are faced by people living with disabilities that accompany tasks of daily living, inspired by “Spoon Theory.” “Spoon Theory” is a metaphor, well-known and loved throughout the disability, chronic illness, and mental health communities, which uses “spoons” to represent living with limited and fluctuating daily energy levels.

A watercolor painting of a young Caucasian woman with brown hair. She lays on her stomach on a blue couch with her legs up behind her. Out of her back are growing brown, morel mushrooms.

Chronic Pain III by KYRIANNA

Talent, Oregon
KYRIANNA is an internationally known watercolor and mixed media artist who creates work centered around the theme of chronic pain and illness. Her practice began young as she developed a debilitating chronic pain condition at the age of twelve. Primarily working one-on-one with others dealing with chronic conditions to create surrealist watercolor portraits, she also explores a variety of mixed media, installation and performance art. Her focus is entirely on the subject of disability, while incorporating themes of feminism, intersectionality, psychology and nature.

A monochromatic self-portrait created with ink, graphite, and digital manipulation, showing a distorted, shapeshifting face emerging from swirling textures against a black background. The face appears fluid and alien-like, with one dark, detailed eye visible in the lower left corner while the rest of the features dissolve into warped forms and layered marks. The flowing textures and abstract contours suggest constant adaptation and internal transformation, reflecting the artist’s experience of autism in relation to societal expectations of normality. The distorted form challenges stigmas and alienating labels, reclaiming identity through self-acceptance and resistance to ideas of what is considered “normal.”

How my Autism makes me feel by Alexandra Ensor

Sheffield, United Kingdom
As a self-portrait in ink, graphite and digital manipulation, I visualise how autism shapes and differentiates me against societal expectations of normality. The piece explores shapeshifting and adapting to the world around me, challenging stigmas surrounding autism, particularly alienating labels like being called an ‘alien’. Swirling marks and textures represent the internalisation of these experiences, showing how they dominate the sense of self while reclaiming identity, encouraging self-acceptance, and protesting normality.

On a 16x20 inch yellow and brown patterned textile background are arranged six sticks. Two are painted bright colors of green, blue, yellow, red, and purple. The rest are wrapped in colorful fabric and embroidery thread.

Walking Stix by Ryn Hodes

Florence, Massachusetts
When Ryn, a collage and assemblage artist, began to use a cane to aid her walking, at age 60, it made visible and public something that had been kept largely personal and private. Using a cane felt inconvenient and awkward at first, but Ryn now has a wardrobe of canes. "Walking Stix" is a celebration of growing into an empowered identity as a person with a disability.

Digital artwork emulating pastels depict a light skinned, brown haired young woman, dressed in pink-purple tones, curving upward from the bottom of the image. She is facing downward with a pained expression. Above her is a violet-blue, sinuous creature with glowing pink eyes and no other facial features. It’s snake like lower body is wrapped around the woman in tight coils while it’s upper half hovers menacingly with outstretched arms. A second identical creature looks up from the bottom right corner. The figures are displayed against a mottled, lavender background.

The Downward Spiral by Rebecca Boutin

Lima
Living with a disability is hard. Because of perceived limitations, I feel I’m living at a disadvantage and am unable to achieve what I see “normal” people obtain with ease. These frustrations often lead to periods of depression.

I decided to keep the art relatively abstract. The monsters represent the negative feelings that go with depression, and how overpowering they can be.

History of Ailments, Reading, Joy, Sorrow and Ageing (Metamorphoses) Work in Progress by Manuela Vladic - Mastruko

Zadar (Croatia)
In my work, images and stories emerge from reflections on the body, space, and memory - on the places, people, and moments we carry within ourselves and that shape who we are.
Through various media, from painting and drawing to animation and installation, I explore how the visible and the invisible can merge in a single moment and space - existing in a compression measured by feeling and presence.
For me, art is a way of being in dialogue with the world, a place where I seek and find silence, the rhythm of breathing, and the wonder of recognition.

A digitally processed image of a person seated in a power wheelchair, rendered in vivid psychedelic colors. They have long dark hair and are looking upward with one arm raised, hand open toward the sky. A small chihuahua rests in their lap. Their legs are bright yellow-orange, their skin tones shifted to cool blues and greens. They wear sneakers and a dark jacket. The swirling background is saturated in purples, pinks, teals, and golds, creating a dreamlike, otherworldly atmosphere around the figure

Astitva Devi: Goddess of Just Existing by Priya Ray

Asheville, North Carolina
I grew up Hindu and Indian American, raised by a disabled mother, searching for myself in the sacred and finding nothing. No goddess who moved like her. No deity who existed like us. So I made one. Astitva Devi, the goddess of just existing, is an act of reclamation. She is the image the world needed to see. She is proof that we are all holy.

"DAAP Pulp exposes the essential core of the body while explores what happens when the body’s systems breakdown and interrelated parts no longer communicate. This work is incredibly light weight because of the materials/processes used and the audience has the opportunity to interact in an intimate way. For instance, an exchange between artist and viewer is created with sculpted forms above as they move throughout shadows in the space. The audience is drawn into the provocative work to become apart of the piece and are offered an opportunity to understand our own growth and decay.

DAAP Pulp by Lisa Merida-Paytes

Cincinnati, Ohio
DAAP Pulp gives evidence to the power of movement’s processes, concepts and materials that do not obviously relate but when probed, inherent threads overarch, network and build transformative connections. Each piece is formed by hundreds of paper strips woven together to create circular shapes, pigmented and stiffened with liquid starch. Some of the forms are coated in porcelain, paperclay slip and fired to burn-out paper and leave ceramic pieces installed inside the larger work.

Several angles of an all glass, miniature bedroom are shown, featuring a hospital bed, bedside table with several detailed items, slippers, a tall lit-up lamp, and an I.V. pole. Roots are seen extending outward from under the bed in all directions. The hospital bed rail is exaggerated in size to mimic prison bars, yet they match the mattress in casting an sparkling iridescence.

Life in Pain by Megan Howard

Columbus, Ohio

"Life in Pain" was inspired by a sketch I created ten years ago about the pain and isolation of being mostly bedbound. I re-imagined my sketch over the last three years, this time with glass as my medium, using a combination of several glass-making techniques.

Making art allows me to visually express myself in a cathartic way, to distract myself from pain, and to have a sense of purpose.

Three images in a horizontal line. The first shows medical supplies laid out in a clean grid including a mask, gloves, needles, meds, and IV bags. The second image shows in the upper left corner an iv bag filled with yellow liquid, a used syringe with its wrapper, and some gauze with a droplet of blood while the majority of the photo shows a medical pad with red droplets. The final photo shows a woman with Osteogenesis imperfecta looking at the camera holding up a full iv bag in a pink gloved hand.

Pamidronate by Esme Felix

Norwalk, California
Pamidronate is a photographic series that documents my lived
experience with chronic illness, medical treatment, and disability.
Through staged clinical imagery, I use medical supplies, self-portraiture, and performance to visualize vulnerability, resilience, and the routine reality of care. The work reflects both physical dependence on treatment and the emotional complexity of navigating healthcare spaces as a disabled person.
Medicine, time, and a body that keeps adapting.
Healing isn't linear it's lived.
Thank you Pamidronate for helping me survive when Osteogenesis Imperfecta decides to do its thing.