Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
A new exhibition arriving in Springfield this summer asks visitors to set aside their assumptions and listen first to People with Disabilities. "The Life I Choose," a collaboration between Abilities First and artist Randy Bacon, opens July 11 at C-Art Gallery and presents black and white portraits alongside short films and first person accounts narrated by the individuals themselves. Rather than filtering those stories through outside judgment, the exhibition centers the perspectives of the people pictured, inviting the community to encounter their lives on their own terms.
Abilities First chief executive Maggie Rollwagen makes clear that the participants are not asking for a place at the margins of Greene County life; they already hold one at its center. She names them leaders, neighbors, workers, students, and storytellers whose creativity and strength bring depth to the community they share, language that pushes back against the instinct to treat disability as something separate from ordinary community membership.
Artist Randy Bacon explains that he came away from this project understanding a meaningful life as something built rather than assigned, never reduced to a diagnosis, a title, or someone else's expectations. He found it shaped instead by everyday choices, the relationships people invest in, and the contributions they choose to make to the world around them. Letting each participant narrate that process firsthand keeps People with Disabilities at the center of their own story.
Bacon's hope for the exhibit, that the community will drop their assumptions long enough to really look at the individual before them, is itself a call to Community Builders. Removing the barriers that keep People with Disabilities on the margins of community life is not a favor offered at someone's convenience; it is a responsibility owned personally by each of us and carried out together. That is the shared work this exhibition calls the whole community to take up, standing with People with Disabilities so that every story finds its place.
Read the Full Article: New Springfield art exhibit challenges views on disability.
By: Janis Reeser
