How Fashion Changed the Perception of Disability Art

When Gabriela Hearst traveled to the Bay Area in April to design costumes for “Carmen” at San Francisco Ballet, she took time to go to Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, meet the artists, try on some of their hand-painted pieces, and do some serious shopping.

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“I have to say, it was so inspiring,” Hearst says of the studio and gallery, which for the last 50 years has served artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities, and helped to carve out space for talents such as Judith Scott, Dan Miller, Ron Veasey and William Scott in the international art market and at major museums.

Earlier this year the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art made a historic $500,000 acquisition of 115 works by Creative Growth artists honoring the art and activism of the disability movement in the Bay Area. “The House That Art Built,” open through Oct. 6, features 80 of those works and is the first of two exhibitions the museum is organizing for the center’s art.

Creative Growth provides studios, supplies, and gallery space to artists, along with selling their work commercially in the wider contemporary market. Wearable art has always been a key part of the output, showcased in the gallery’s annual “Beyond Trend” runway shows that have gotten bigger and bigger since they began in 2010, carrying on the art-to-wear tradition of the Bay Area seen in hippie culture, the designs of Kaisik Wong and others.

The most recent “Beyond Trend” runway show was in June, taking over the 12,000-square-foot former auto repair shop turned studio space, and East 24th Street in downtown Oakland outside. Five hundred spectators paid $100 a ticket to watch the joyful promenade of models and the artists themselves wearing their clothing with brightly colored weaving, hand embroidery, fabric painting and printing, as well as jewelry and soft sculpture.

After the show, everything worn on the runway was immediately for sale, from a hand-painted Levi’s denim jacket to a pair of ruffled wrap shorts that would give Comme des Garçons a run for its money. The ensuing frenzy to try on and buy the pieces, priced from $40 to $750, rivaled that of a designer sample sale.

Fashion Industry Support

“It’s like a fashion ambassadorship, Creative Growth,” says retailer Ben Ospital of San Francisco’s Modern Appealing Clothing, who sells Creative Growth art and clothing at his specialty store alongside Comme des Garçons, Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck and others. “We’ve had so many designers come to town, even from Europe, who’ve gone there. It’s a beacon.”

Paper magazine cofounder Kim Hastreiter has been “compulsively” buying pieces for the last 30 years, and has more than 200 in her collection. On Sept. 25 she will cohost a special 50th anniversary gala and “Beyond Trend” fashion show at SFMOMA.

“Little by little, I got to know different artists. One of my favorites is William Scott. I have all his heads. He did these heads of girlfriends he wanted because he was looking for a girlfriend,” says Hastreiter, who has the colorful sculptures on a table in her apartment as part of her collection, which will be featured in her upcoming memoir “Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos.”

Over the years she’s raised awareness for the gallery, bringing jeweler Irene Neuwirth, artist Cindy Sherman, arts patron Agnes Gund, musician David Byrne and many more to visit. Hastreiter helped to arrange collaborations for Creative Growth artists with Target and Method Products, and to land their pieces in the windows of Barneys New York. The gallery has also collaborated with Marc Jacobs and Madewell on T-shirts, Vans on sneakers, and Levi’s on custom trucker jackets. Clare Vivier, Erica Tanov, Baggu, Freda Salvador and The Real Real have also provided product for artists to transform.

“Some of the earliest people that embraced Creative Growth artists’ work as being credible and magnificent and forward thinking were fashion people,” says Tom Di Maria, director of Creative Growth Art Center, speaking to WWD at the “Beyond Trend” fashion show in June. “Fashion people look at what’s new, what’s now, what’s different. And the art world looks at academic traditions.”

Setting the Stage

Creative Growth is a product of the Bay Area in every way, he says.

“We were founded in 1974 and that is a very particular time in the San Francisco Bay area of hippie culture, Berkeley free speech, the Black Panthers, and organizing around the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, that’s all happening here. And at the same time, then-Gov. [Ronald] Reagan was deinstitutionalizing people with disabilities in California who had lived most of their lives in institutions, and they were being moved into the community without a lot of thought about what would happen and what their path forward would be,” he says.

“So our founders, Elias and Florence Katz, living in Berkeley — he’s a psychologist knowing that this deinstitutionalization is going to happen and she’s an artist believing in the power of creativity — they say, well, ‘We’ll put paint in the garage, in our home, and people can come here.’ So it started with a really radical idea that you were supposed to go from being institutionalized to being an artist overnight. But I always like to say that, like Hewlett Packard and Apple were these crazy Bay Area stories that started in a garage with a vision. People think it’s crazy, and then it’s the status quo.”

Stella Ishii, the 6397 designer and co-owner of New York’s The News fashion showroom, was the first to exhibit the work of Judith Scott, opening up her New York fashion showroom on Broadway in 2001. The late fiber artist, who was institutionalized for much of her life because of Down syndrome and deafness, is now internationally known and had a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016.

“Judith’s work, because it’s a lot of yarn and fabrics, I think fashion people related to it so easily. There is more and more of that now, but she was very early,” says Ishiii, who has about 60 Creative Growth artworks herself and also donates her excess clothing stock for artists to work on. “She was using that because that’s what was available. At the time, I also was working with Susan Cianciolo and this new wave of artist-designers and I think there was a connection there for sure. The art world is so established whereas in fashion, we’re a lot more open — there is that space for us to love something because it speaks to you.”

Ishii has continued to host events for Creative Growth in New York, and visits the studio in Oakland whenever she can. “It’s such a happy place, which you don’t expect because they all have serious disabilities and hard lives,” she says.

The Creative and Commercial Environment

The studio has served about 1,800 artists, with 150 currently enrolled, aged 21 to 81, and they are all paid for their work. Some have been coming for 40 years.

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Their media and subject matter vary.

“There’s always food and pop culture because that’s something that everyone experiences. So even if they are living in a group home, or someplace without a lot of cultural richness, you have TV, magazines and music,” says Di Maria. “And then there’s a second level of work that relates to disability around mark making and obsessive repetition that’s somehow hypnotic. A lot of fiber artists will say that the act of pulling the yarn through their hands or knitting is extremely calming…And there’s something beautiful in the obsessive qualities of that work that’s also personally satisfying.”

There’s also artwork that brings Oakland to life.

“Yeah, I mean, what do you read about Oakland? A shooting, or the mayor’s home is raided, and then you come here and it’s a beautiful celebration…It’s important to know that culture lives here and we’re a part of that,” he says.

At the “Beyond Trend” fashion show in June, artist Joe Spears was beaming about the hand-painted hoodie and boxing gloves he wore as he went jabbing down the runway. They were inspired by Michael Halsband’s 1985 double portrait of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat pictured side-by-side and wearing boxing trunks and boxing gloves.

Spears has spent 15 years at Creative Growth, says his mom Attilah Rainey. “It’s been such a great experience from Day One, and it’s something he always looks forward to,” she says. “He loves art, drawing and color…and a lot of his friends are coming here, too. Every time I come to one of these shows it’s always a new emotion, because you are getting all this energy from people.”

Although Creative Growth is not an art therapy center, something therapeutic does happen by making art.

“You see that all the time from family members saying, ‘You know, my brother on the spectrum never looked at anyone in the eye or verbalized…and suddenly they find he’s different…more communicative…more content,” says Di Maria. “When a work sells, because the artist gets paid, I’ve had family members bring the checks back and say, ‘There has to be a mistake. My child couldn’t do this.’ And we see how the whole idea of disability, even within families and cultures, has changed, and we see that kind of pride within the artists as well…People with disabilities are often measured by deficiencies throughout their life, and then when you have an opportunity to have an accomplishment, it really sinks in. I think that’s an amazing moment for personal growth.”

To date, the record sale for a Creative Growth artist is $95,000 for a Judith Scott sculpture. But the market hasn’t always been that way.

“In the beginning, it was hard for anybody to take it seriously. When I started working here, our annual art sales were $20,000, and this year, they will be $1.4 million. And a lot of the artists working here are the same,” says Di Maria, who takes Creative Growth work to seven to eight art fairs a year in New York, London and Paris, the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennale and Art Basel in Switzerland.

Next up is the Volta Art Fair in New York from Sept. 4 to 8, which coincides with New York Fashion Week. “Because we have a presence in the New York fashion world, it makes sense,” says Di Maria, who will also kick off a new clothing collaboration with The RealReal Sept. 6 with an event at the retailer’s pop-up space at 301 Canal Street.

“It’s about the context in which the work is seen. And it’s been a 25-year mission. The field has been driven by collectors…And if collectors get interested, the galleries get interested. And then you find people with important curatorial eyes or visions or fashion people that give it a different kind of weight. And then you start to approach museums, and the collectors that are on the boards of museums.”

Reaching Equality

The SFMOMA partnership has been a game changer.

“Did you hear the glass ceiling just break?” Di Maria says.

While the museum had exhibited several Creative Growth artists previously, the acquisition, exhibitions, and related programs “not only celebrate the rich history of art and disability justice in the Bay Area and the leadership role that Creative Growth has played in it, but also the long overdue recognition that so many Creative Growth artists deserve as an important part of the art historical canon,” says museum director Chris Bedford.

“To have the artists’ work be included in the SFMOMA and in the contemporary art culture, we’ve had to make some decisions around assimilation and the work being seen as contemporary art first, and not disability art. That’s how we made the advancement,” says Di Maria. “Curators are already scrambling, and museums are feeling like they have to catch up. Now that we’ve got our foot in the door, it’s about having the artists be truly equal.”

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