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Artist and Disability Activist Riva Lehrer in conversation with Lawrence Weschler

Live Streamed discussion Jul 26, 2021 03:00 PM EDT

Profile

Lawrence Weschler

Lawrence Weschler was for over twenty years a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies, and then the director, now emeritus, of the NY Institute for the Humanities at NYU and concurrently the artistic director, also...
Riva Lehrer

Riva Lehrer is an artist, writer and curator who focuses on the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people whose physical embodiment, sexuality, or gender identity have long been stigmatized.Her work has been exhibited in venues including the National Portrait Gallery...

That Riva Lehrer is alive at all is a matter of remarkable luck and coincidence. Had it not been for the fact that in 1958, her mother was working as a researcher in a lab doing groundbreaking work on natal anomalies, Ms. Lehrer might not have long survived her birth. But she benefited from both innovative surgeries—and the visionary attentions of that mother. Now, decades later, Ms. Lehrer has become a leading figure in Disability Culture in the United States, known internationally as a portrait artist whose work challenges staid conceptions of beauty, through images that depict the power and allure of variant bodies—and lives.

On this occasion (as it happens, of the 46^th anniversary of the death of her mother), Ms Lehrer will be conversing with Lawrence Weschler, who last year blurbed her extraordinary new memoir, Golem Girl, as follows:

“Oy, what a story: Job, eat your heart out! In Riva Lehrer’s life chronicle, an appalling fate (and I don’t just mean the circumstances of her birth) gets visited upon an invincible character, and the result is a wincing-wise tale, by turns harrowing and hilarious, cut clean through with flecks of grace and beauty.”