Otherhow brings together four decades of writings, lectures, interviews, and documentation of work by the artist Joseph Grigely. Deaf since the age of ten, his art and writing have long questioned and made use of various modes of communication—photographs, handwritten notes, lipreading, newspaper headlines, paintings, and TV captions—to examine and scrutinize the ableism embedded in cultural and media production. From his brilliant series of postcards addressed to Sophie Calle, where he began to formulate a theory on the intersection of disability and art, to his epic lecture “On Failure,” which brings together the poet Keats, “the first woman of fly tying” Helen Shaw, and the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky to the same table for a conversation on beauty. Grigely’s writing is erudite, but clear; righteous with fury, but dryly humorous.

An underlying theme throughout are modes of access and how issues of accessibility and their resolution provide a benefit to everyone, not just the disabled. Chapters devoted to art, access, and advocacy underpin the interconnected nature of these issues in a maddening, but ultimately enlightening manner. Letters of complaint, faxes and emails, unpublished op-eds, exhibition proposals, statements on equality and access; each provide a glimpse into how Grigely’s work has been shaped by—or constructed from—the “tangled process” of opening access.

The book is rounded out by a series of visual inventories; collections of images that document failures of access or, in the case of the Obituaries, highlights those who had a disability or were activists working to establish greater access for those with disabilities.

Joseph Grigely, artist, educator, and activist is currently a Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He holds a DPhil from Oxford in English literature and has taught at Gallaudet University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan. Exhibiting widely in the US and Europe, his most recent show In What Way Wham? was presented at MASS MoCA in 2023-24. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, and the Stedelijk Museum, amongst others.

400 pages
7.75 x 10 inches
Paperback
May 2025
ISBN: 9798991036719

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Editor: Ryan Haley
Managing Editor: Sam Korman
Designer: Siiri Tännler