Riva Lehrer’s Exquisite Bodies

Riva Lehrer’s art is shaped by her lived experience as a queer, Jewish artist born with spina bifida. In her words, “Being stared at, and looking back, has colored my work.”

Lehrer says her portraits “do not ask for sympathy, or empathy, or even that viewers agree that the subjects are beautiful. I simply want viewers to daydream the life of the person before them. To stretch ourselves toward a world where all bodies are exquisite.”         

Alison Bechdel is an acclaimed cartoonist known for her authentic portrayal of LGBTQ+ life. An adaptation of her graphic memoir Fun Home, which poignantly illustrates her complex relationship with her late father, won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Musical. 

Bechdel later wrote, Lehrer “captured something very uncomfortable about my relationship to my own creativity—how painful and mediated it is, how I impose so many obstacles for myself. . . . Uncomfortable in a useful and productive way, but uncomfortable nonetheless.”

Lehrer made this portrait for her series The Risk Pictures. Realizing that portrait subjects often feel vulnerable when stared at for hours, Lehrer wanted to change the traditional artist-sitter dynamic. So, she asked her sitters to alter their portrait in a meaningful way.

This drawing of Wong is a study for a portrait completed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both works are part of Lehrer’s Zoom Portraits series. 

In an interview with Wong, Lehrer explained, “as soon as somebody, a viewer, sees like a wheelchair or a crutch or an adaptive device or whatever . . . the idea is, I think, that in ableist society . . . disabled lives are by definition [seen as] full of suffering and misery.”

“. . . if you even try to show a disabled person being happy or sexual or joyous or just complex, ableist thought and perception will think that thing is covering over the authentic suffering of the disabled person!”