Re-Imagine Disability with Opulent Mobility!

Please give today! Your donation to the Opulent Mobility 2023 fundraiser will help us thrive. You'll also receive fine art cards and prints of founder A. Laura Brody's mobility artworks.

Opulent Mobility asks artists and audience members to re-imagine disability as opulent and powerful. Our vision is a world where disability is celebrated instead of denied, ignored, and feared. Opulent Mobility brings disability art into the fine arts realm, gives opportunities to disabled artists, and starts conversations between disabled and able bodied people about creating a more equitable world for us all.

The idea for these exhibits began when founder A. Laura Brody’s former partner had a stroke. During his physical therapy, she met an 85 year old man and a four year old girl doing stroke rehabilitation. It was crystal clear that disability could happen to anyone at any age for any reason. While she was fascinated at the adaptive devices that helped people get around, she was put off by their cold and clinical designs. Eventually, she invited others to re-imagine disability through the lens of art.

Each year Opulent Mobility puts out a new a call for art that brings in artists from across the country and around the world. Since 2020, online artist talks and video tours of the exhibits became part of the annual offerings. This year Opulent Mobility is expanding into weekly online programming covering a wide range of topics with a community lecture series (Genius Teatime), individual artist interviews, and an online Plague Wear Gala that asks disabled and able bodied artists to develop their own high style plague repellant designs. This new programming is rapidly expanding Opulent Mobility’s audience and outreach and will benefit even more artists. In addition, we are starting to offer Opulent Mobility as a touring exhibit along with online workshops on the importance of the disability perspective, getting into the art world as a disabled artist, and developing exhibits for beginners.

This year our goal is to rapidly expand our audience and make the exhibits and new programming accessible and welcoming to folks who are blind, low vision, hard of hearing, or Deaf. This means ADA compliant spaces, audio and ASL descriptions of the artworks, more online offerings, live captioning, and ASL interpreters for live and online events. We are partnering with Pro Bono ASL, an interpreting service which provides free ASL for Deaf people and a sliding scale fee for the hearing, and will hire Deaf interpreters to add ASL videos to the website. Cheryl Green, a survivor of and longtime advocate for people with traumatic brain injury, will provide corrected captioning. Your funding will also help artists who cannot afford art transportation; digital files can be printed and framed on site, relieving artists of the cost of shipping and insurance.

Thank you for your generous support! Let's re-imagine disability together.