ph6 An Artist Who Has Something in Common With Her Subjects

Updated:2025-01-06 04:44    Views:108

On the evening in early November when I met the artist Rachel Handlin at White Columns, the prestigious nonprofit gallery in the West Villageph6, she immediately outstretched her arms.

“I’m a hugger,” she said. “You’re so cute,” she added.

For years, economists have been developing a system of “true cost accounting” based on the growing body of evidence about the environmental damage caused by different types of agriculture. Now, emerging research aims to translate this damage to the planet into dollar figures.

Neil Gostling, a paleobiologist at the University of Southampton in England, listens to these aspersions and laughs. “Eighty-three years later, the idea persists that dodos were slow, fat, useless balls of feathers that blundered into their own demise,” he said. “The fact is that the birds were fast, agile and, before being wiped out, had been doing their thing and doing it incredibly well for about 12 million years.”

I thanked her and replied that she was cute, too.

www lodi777 com

“You’re cute,” she said. “I’m beautiful, actually.”

Ms. Handlin, 29, was almost finished installing her first solo show, “strangers are friends I haven’t met yet.” Like the blue line of cyanotype images tracing the rooms where her photos, sculptures and video works are displayed, the show “connects the community who didn’t know it,” she explained. “It is a community through the image.”

That community is composed of roughly two dozen people with Down syndrome across the globe who have graduated from two- or four-year colleges — like Ms. Handlin herself, who holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts. In May, after graduating with a master’s in fine arts from Pratt Institute, Ms. Handlin became the first person with Down syndrome to receive a master's degree, she and her family believe.

For five years, she and her mother, Laura Handlin, who is her aide and studio assistant, traveled to far-flung places like Peru, Australia and Spain to take her peers’ portraits. “I just met them all on Facebook,” Ms. Handlin said.

As she surveyed her work, Ms. Handlin recited the biographies of some of her subjects — like the Spanish actor and disability activist Pablo Pineda and the Missouri-based chocolatier Adam DeBacker — pausing occasionally to glance at the wall text.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.ph6

• Who
• Has
• an
• ph6
• Artist