Carolyn Lazard

2019 PEW FELLOW
Updated
21 Oct 2019

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An ink drawing by Carolyn Lazard depicts them lying in bed with their face partially obscured by their Apple laptop computer. The image is displayed in a simple wooden frame.

Pew Fellow Carolyn Lazard, Carolyn Working, 2020; pen on paper, 11” × 14.” Image courtesy of the artist and Essex Street Gallery.

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Installation of a white wall featuring six brown smiling cartoon faces in an even row just over half-way up the wall.

Carolyn Lazard, Pain Scale, 2019, adhesive decal. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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An artwork of Carolyn Lazard consisting of a white wall flanked by bookshelves with over a dozen vaces full of flowers in front of it.

Pew Fellow Carolyn Lazard, Support System (for Park, Tina, and Bob), 2016. Photo courtesy of the artist.

“My practice develops from the position that accessibility is not supplementary, but should be the very foundation and grounds for how we navigate the world.”

Carolyn Lazard is a visual artist whose sculptures, videos, installations, and performances center disability and accessibility. Their work appropriates existing video and objects—an approach Lazard describes as “the most disabled way of making,” as it relies on “the labor of others as a structural element of the work.” Lazard believes that disability is not a rare occurrence but rather one that every person experiences in some way, and the artist’s work employs that experience as a creative lens through which they imagine alternative modes of accessibility, labor, and care. In the 2016 piece Support System (for Park, Tina, and Bob), Lazard collected bouquets of flowers from audience members, using the bouquets as both the cost of admission to an intimate one-on-one performance and the materials to create a collaborative sculpture. Their 2017 video A Recipe for Disaster used the first program shown with captions on US television in 1972 to examine the terms of media accessibility. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally: in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; LUX, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Kitchen, New York City. Lazard holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.