Riva Lehrer’s Portraits Bring Out the Beauty in Difference

CHICAGO — Monsters are making art in Zolla Lieberman Gallery. They work in pairs and on a schedule. One of them is Riva Lehrer, whose solo exhibition is currently on view; the other is the subject of a portrait that is their joint work. Her invited guests include the scholar who coined the term “monster theory” and a prominent art historian specializing in queer studies. Full disclosure: My husband is a future participant; I’ve already had my turn. None of us are recognizable as monsters, but the show is titled The Monster Studio, and Lehrer explains that she’s interested in us because of our attempts to be agents of change in the world, and the potential struggles and risks of those actions. She’s a deft conversationalist, and visitors are welcome to eavesdrop on what is normally hidden behind studio doors. Our artworks, finished or not, are displayed on a dedicated wall at the front of the gallery.

Of course, there are actual monsters depicted in The Monster Studio. Any fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will recognize Lehrer’s bijou paintings of Angel, Spike, Willow, and one of the Gentlemen, a deeply creepy villain from season four of the cult classic TV show. But the presence here of Buffy and friends is something of a ruse — oh yes, vampires, witches, demons, that’s what monsters look like — given Lehrer’s decades of work as a portraitist of real people with stigmatized bodies and identities. In another era, viewers would have described her subjects as monsters.

Lehrer relates some of the mythological, superstitious, and medical origins of that nomenclature in Golem Girl, her memoir about being born with spina bifida in Cincinnati in 1958. It was a time when most such children were not expected to survive. The book details in vivid, cinematic prose a childhood of countless medical interventions meant to “fix” her, her struggles through a pre-ADA education system, and how she eventually found herself part of a group of artists, writers, and performers building Disability Culture.

Lehrer’s great contribution to that movement has been to create fearlessly direct portraits of its constituents, in the belief that visibility matters. A few recent instances are presented in The Monster Studio, including a singularly elegant picture of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a bioethicist and humanities scholar, posed in a long maroon dress and holding a specimen vitrine containing a fetus whose impairment mirrors her own. Both have syndactyly, in which fingers become fused or fail to fully develop in utero. In “Species,” Lehrer drapes her own nude body over her partner’s, revealing scars and veins and saggy translucent flesh, some of it the facts of any older woman’s body, some particular to their two specific bodies. The couple grasp hands and stare fixedly, daringly, vulnerably, right out at the viewer.

I’ve looked at decades of Lehrer’s portraits, and most of her subjects hold this same intense gaze. Sometimes it feels like a challenge, but more often it reveals a powerful openness, a desire to be seen. Her delicate pencil sketch of the Irish novelist David Mitchell is different. It renders him completely immersed in a book, eyes downcast, head resting against an upraised hand. Mitchell hand wrote a chatty letter to Lehrer directly atop the picture, a collaborative element that appears throughout The Risk Pictures, the long-running series to which it belongs. The showstopper of The Monster Studio is an outgrowth of this series that was done with Sky Cubacub, a local fashion designer who creates exultant neon custom clothing for queer and disabled people under the label Rebirth Garments. Lehrer’s drawing of Cubacub teems with fabulous figures stitched by the latter from lavender and turquoise organdy, all of them dancing around their costumer, themself busy crafting a length of paper chainmail using paper pliers. “The Mutual Mirror” rocks like a disco on paper and is as technically masterful a mixed-media work as they come. It also has a second part: Cubacub’s wearable portrait of Lehrer, a space-age frock coat embroidered across the back with golden stitches that follow the curvature of her scoliotic spine. A photo of Lehrer dressed in it at the exhibition opening hangs nearby. 

Some of the risks revealed in The Risk Pictures reflect those of any kind of portraiture. It can be scary to be inspected so intently, to have one’s appearance fixed permanently. Mitchell notes, “Your portrait doesn’t flatter me, but it doesn’t uglify me either.” I reacted similarly to the pencil drawing Lehrer did of me while I was constructing a collage from cut-up catalog and pamphlet essays I’d written over my two-plus decades as an art critic. At 48 years of age and not a naturally photogenic person, I’ve mostly dodged my picture being taken. But Lehrer’s oeuvre prompted me to realize what a privilege those feelings are: rarely have I suffered from feeling unseen or, conversely, been threatened for how I look.

The same cannot be said for Lehrer. She articulates this in “The Zoom Portraits: Sharrona Pearl,” a three-part drawing completed in 2021. Pearl, a medical ethicist, is the author of books on face blindness and face transplants, and Lehrer transcribed portions of their dialogue around the hand-drawn computer windows framing their visages. They discuss how the COVID pandemic is affecting people with disabled bodies and facial disfigurements, and the presumption that hiding their bodies on zoom and shielding their faces behind masks will come as a relief. It might, says Lehrer, but it would also feel “like half your truth is gone, divorced from your identity.” She names it “body silence,” and it is exactly the thing she has been fighting all along, for herself and for others, with deep sincerity, wild courage, and fierce love for the monsters in us all.

Riva Lehrer: The Monster Studio continues at Zolla Lieberman Gallery (325 West Huron Street, Chicago, Illinois) through October 12. The exhibition was organized by the gallery. A schedule of participants is available on the gallery website.