Riva Lehrer is no stranger to difficult times. Growing up with spina bifida in the 1950s and ’60s, Riva experienced a very ableist world where children with disabilities were often hidden from public view. She very quickly had to learn to mask her own disability or acquire other identities to overshadow her “differentness.” She didn’t learn how to advocate or vocalize her needs as a disabled person until later in life. It was through her art and writing, and joining the Disabled Artists Collective, that gave Riva a way to portray and publicly amplify the humanness of those with impairments as people like everyone else, including herself. Riva stands squarely at the intersection of so many identities: advocate, disabled, queer, artist, writer, professor, public speaker, Jewish, and a woman. But the one she gets asked to weigh in on the most is disability, as if the mere fact that she has a disability makes her an expert in the field: “When I present my portrait work with people with impairments and who deal with stigma I can’t just talk about the art or some other aspect of the art. I’ll start talking about working with some trans or queer subjects and most of the time people just want to bring it back to disability. It often feels like a lot of me is left outside the door.”
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