PITTSBURGH — From afar, Dominic Quagliozzi’s “Blue Morpho” looks like a large, multicolored butterfly, affixed to a wall at Contemporary Craft.
Get closer and the materials tell another story.
The Worcester, Mass., artist made the piece partly from hospital gowns and moving blankets. Quagliozzi has cystic fibrosis and received a double lung transplant in 2015. Hospitals and their materials have surrounded him for much of his life.
Advertisement – Continue Reading Below
“From a distance, it just looks like a butterfly,” he said. “And then as you get closer, you can kind of see the detail,” including the patterns of a hospital gown.
That transformation — from an attractive object into something more complicated, intimate and potentially uncomfortable — is at the heart of “Textures of Being,” an exhibition that opened in September and runs through Jan. 16 at the gallery in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood.
The show brings together work by 14 artists with disabilities — two invited and 12 selected from submissions to the gallery — who use fiber, ceramics, metal, paper and mixed media. Rather than treating disability as something to overcome, hide or correct, their work draws directly from disabled bodies and experiences.
The exhibition highlights a broad movement known as disability art, in which artists examine disability from their own perspectives — including the ways bodies are viewed, treated and accommodated by medicine, culture and society.
Yu-San Cheng, Contemporary Craft’s director of visual engagement and one of the exhibition’s jurors, said the title deliberately refers both to physical texture and something less tangible.
“The texture means the textures that you encounter that you can feel, but it also means the textures of our lived experience,” she said.
Cheng points out that textiles recur in the exhibit, which she sees as embodying the idea of softness as a form of strength.
Craft also offers a familiar entry point into a subject that some visitors may initially find difficult.
“You use mugs, you feel the clay every day. … You wear clothes every day,” she said.
Familiar materials can be “more inviting” and lower the barrier to conversations about disability, illness and the body.
The disability experience
Chicago artist Sandie Chun-Shan Yi, one of two invited artists in the exhibition, says artists with disabilities are creating a different visual vocabulary.
“We don’t see disabled people being represented in more complex ways (that) show the complexity of what disability means,” she said. She and other like-minded artists, however, are exploring “how meanings of disability (are) created in the society.”
Born in Taiwan with two fingers on each hand and two toes on each foot, Yi felt her difference early on. As a child, she said, strangers sometimes treated her body as a problem to be solved, offering unwanted help or assuming there were things she could not do.
It took years — and encounters with other artists with disabilities — before she began to understand those experiences as part of something larger than herself.
Learning about disability art and disability studies gave her language for experiences she previously struggled to describe. Instead of seeing disability chiefly through a narrative of “overcoming,” she began questioning assumptions that shaped others’ — and her own — view of her body.
That shift helped lead her to what she calls her Crip Couture series, a form of wearable art centered on disabled bodies and stories. “Crip,” a term once used as an insult, has been reclaimed by some people with disabilities as an identity.
Unlike fashion that modifies existing designs to adapt to disabled bodies, Yi starts with disability, such as creating two-fingered gloves. She incorporates the bodies, histories and experiences of people with disabilities into the designs.
“It’s about caring,” she said.
The exhibition’s other invited artist, Bhavna Mehta, approaches the same subject through different materials.
Born and raised in India and now based in San Diego, Mehta contracted polio at age 7 and has used a wheelchair since childhood. She originally trained in science and technology and worked as a software engineer before turning to art as a career at about 40, according to Cheng.
Her intricate work combines paper cutting and embroidery — practices with roots in her childhood in India. Mehta has written that she grew up in an extended family surrounded by women who embroidered, knitted and sewed. In her work, she uses “paper as skin and thread to connect and mend,” she wrote, while drawing on Indian folk art traditions.
For “Textures of Being,” those techniques become a way of examining her own body and its medical history.
One work begins with a 1980s X-ray of Mehta’s spine that she kept for decades and later embroidered. Instead of a clinical image of a body altered by polio and medical intervention, she has created her own narrative.
That impulse becomes monumental in “Fault Lines,” a sprawling paper installation based on a cross-section of the spinal cord. Mehta developed the work after consulting researchers at the Salk Institute in California to better understand how the polio virus attacks motor neurons. Tiny hand-cut paper forms, individually pinned in place, map the structures and functions of the spinal cord.
The installation is simultaneously delicately beautiful, scientific and personal. Cheng described it as reflecting Mehta’s desire to understand her disability rather than treating the medical explanation as the final word.
Experience into artwork
Like Mehta, Quagliozzi turns medical objects into artistic materials. He has spent much of his career incorporating hospital gowns and linens, nitrile gloves and even the antiseptic Betadine into his work.
As a child, he wanted to be an athlete, but worsening lung function made that increasingly difficult. He turned instead to drawing athletes, inventing team logos and making pretend jerseys.
Eventually, illness became his subject matter.
“Art has obviously very much helped me process and learn how to speak about it,” he said.
Assembled from colored and cut hospital gowns and moving blankets, “Blue Morpho” carries a story in its fabric, which as absorbed stains, tears and wear — what he calls the “residue of emotion and labor and physicality.”
Moving blankets also carry another association. Chronic illness can mean repeatedly being uprooted from ordinary life and moving back into a hospital for days or weeks at a time.
His second work in the show, “Co-Parenting,” is even more personal.
Quagliozzi saved the lung-shaped pillow he was given after his transplant to brace against his chest when coughing or moving.
Years later, after becoming a father, he combined the pillow with one of his son’s old teddy bears. He cut and reconstructed the bear into the shape of lungs and fastened it to the transplant pillow.
The title refers to his relationship with the anonymous donor whose lungs have kept him alive.
“Without my donor’s lungs, I wouldn’t have had my son,” Quagliozzi said. “I would’ve died before that.”
Taking care of the donated lungs, he said, has allowed him in turn to care for his child.
His story continues to change. Eleven years after his transplant, Quagliozzi said he has developed signs of rejection and is undergoing treatment. Even that unsettling development, he said, may become material for his work.
Of course he is sad and disappointed. But he also sees it as “an exciting time for my work because I can get a whole other set of experiences that I can draw from.”
Quagliozzi would probably agree with Yi when she says people with disabilities are often seen as either sad or heroic — and that that is a simplistic view of disability.
Yi wants, she said, “to really talk about holding a space for disability and for all the joy, the pain” and the range of experiences between them.
“Textures of Being” runs through Jan. 16 at Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh. Admission is free.
© 2026 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
