In 1922, if you were missing a limb or had a disability that people gawked at, you risked a $50 fine if you ventured onto the streets of Chicago. The intent of the ordinance that restricted such movement was evident in its wording: the city wanted to shield the public from those who were “in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.” The ordinance–which the City Council didn’t repeal until 1974–is now on display at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, amid other documents, art, and artifacts that tell the at times shameful, at times inspiring history of disability in Chicago: from mid-19th-century institutionalization and relocation efforts to the early-20th-century eugenics initiatives to modern disability rights movements that demanded accessible public transportation and housing and paved the path for activist groups such as Not Dead Yet, which opposes legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide, and Jerry’s Orphans, which annually protests Jerry Lewis’s televised pity parties.
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Curated by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, who teach disability studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Chicago Disability History Exhibit is a massive undertaking that took two years to launch. “We had to scour out a history that had never been collected before and was buried,” says Mitchell. They met with people from disability organizations and independent-living centers, interviewed city officials and judges who helped shape the city’s laws and policies concerning the disabled, and pored over the archives at the Chicago Historical Society and the Harold Washington Library.
Not long after the exhibit opened something curious started happening: visitors began discreetly leaving their own art and memorabilia on the floor and on an information table. The curators found drawings by autistic children (left by their teacher) and photos of former poster children for muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy fund-raisers posing with celebrities like John Ritter.
The police detective who arrived at the exhibit last week to take a report about the theft asked Mitchell and Snyder whether the stolen items had been kept in secure display cases. They hadn’t been. Just as the curators had settled on a lower than usual sight line to make the items on display accessible to people of short stature and people in wheelchairs, they’d kept the cases unlocked, so blind visitors could handle the contents.
Where: National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, 1801 S. Indiana
