Manual: 17 Variance

Manual 17 considers the disabled and/or ill body, from historical stereotypes to prideful contemporary images. This issue complements the RISD Museum exhibition Variance: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Disability, on view through October 9, 2022.

Disability is a material phenomenon, but it is also a narrative occasion. How we acquire, experience, and live out our disabilities is a story prompt we answer with words, sounds, images, and objects—all of the story-making tools of human culture.

–Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

From the Files
Emily Banas provides supporting documentation for the Eames leg splint

Double Takes
Sky Cubacub and Ellen Samuels circle around Lanzavecchia + Wai’s Tattoo Back Brace
Joey Terrill and Cynthia Wu look to Masami Teraoka’s AIDS Series
Maureen C. O’Brien and Carmen Papalia contemplate Thomas Sgouros’s Remembered Landscape
Robert McRuer and Jaklin Romine gaze right back at Robert Andy Coombs’s Cuddle on Couch

Artists on Art
Joan Giroux writes to her friend Matthew
Riva Lehrer navigates Zoom and the hazards of mirror-gazing while making her portrait of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Portfolio
Conor Moynihan assembles some things that go together, even if not obviously so

Object Lessons
Alexandra Courtois de Viçose reveals Toulouse-Lautrec’s deaf gain
Leon J. Hilton opens up Michael Mazur’s Images from a Locked Ward
Bianca Frohne crips a medieval statue of St. Roch
Anand Prahlad reflects on Marlon Mullen’s Untitled

How To
Indira Allegra documents disability

K. MacNeil does things with their mouth

Manual: a journal about art and its making, a twice-yearly publication, uses the collections, exhibitions, and collaborations of the RISD Museum as an impetus for essays and interviews, artist interventions, and archive highlights. A fusion of academic arts journal and design magazine, Manual is a resource for engaged conversations about art, design, and the impact of creative making by curators, artists, scholars, and educators.

Proceeds from RISD Museum publications support the work of the museum.