It's called for Dear Life, the first exhibition to survey the themes of illness and disability

and American art from the mid-20th century up to the COVID pandemic.

It's part of PST art, an enormous collaboration of Southern

California arts institutions around the theme of art and science. Senior

arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown visited the exhibition for our ongoing look at the

intersection of health and arts, part of our canvas coverage, and our series

disability reframed.

Drawings from a six-week stay at a hospital after suffering a debilitating breakdown.

A woman in a wheelchair with an able-bodied lover.

An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting transformed into an installation.

For dear life, art, medicine and disability, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary

Art San Diego chronicles the experience of illness through art, what it looks like how it feels.

Senior curator Jill Dossie.

The idea of holding on.

It evokes, you know, kind of an extreme state of being, but we hope it might also kind of

of conjure up the idea of holding on to something else, whether it is holding onto your seat,

holding on to an assistive device like a grab bar, holding on to someone else and also thinking about the idea that it's in the

act of holding on that life becomes dear. The exhibition offers decades worth of artists who lived the experience in many ways and incorporated them into their work.

Artists create a public discourse and they reframe the idea of disability itself as a space of creativity and

generativity and improvisation and ingenuity and that's what we see in all of these artists.

Artists like Yvonne Rainer, the dancer and choreographer who made hand movie from her hospital bed while recovering from surgery.

David Hachmy, who as he started losing his hearing,

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