Weave In, Weave Out: A Disability Socially Engaged Art Exhibition
Curated by Amanda Cachia with Intertwine Arts
Amanda Cachia
Amanda Cachia (Ph.D. UCSD, 2017) is Professor of Practice in Museum Studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and Affiliate Faculty in the Disability Studies B.A. Her research interests include disability art history, theory and activism, crip curatorial practices and access aesthetics, museums, institutional critique, and social justice, and critical disability approaches to translation, movement, medicine, and health. Cachia is the author of three books, Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art, (forthcoming 2027), Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025), and The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024), the latter of which has been shortlisted for the College Art Association’s 2026 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She is also editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes over 40 international contributors. She is currently working on her fourth book project, Disability Art: A Political History. She has guest edited two Special Issues for peer-reviewed journals, including “Curating New Openings: Re-thinking Diversity in the Museum,” Art Journal (2017); and “Transdisciplinarity in Disability, Art, and Design,” Journal of Arts and Communities (2024). A widely published scholar, Cachia’s texts have appeared in 20 edited volumes, and in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Curatorial Studies, Woman’s Art Journal, Journal of Modern Craft, Senses & Society, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Museums and Social Issues, and other venues. Her article, “Crip Curation and the Aesthetics of the Undeliverable” published in the Journal of Visual Culture won the the Early Career Research Prize from the International Association for Visual Culture (2022). Her writing has been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian.
Since 2010, Cachia has organized 20 art exhibitions devoted to the work of disabled artists. In 2024, her exhibition Smoke & Mirrors at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University was supported by a $180,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. From 2023-2024, she was a curatorial consultant and commissioned essayist for the Getty Foundation and Getty Research Institute initiative PST ART exhibition and catalogue For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, Disability held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She is currently developing the major touring exhibition Vital Signs: From Patient to Power with Mid-America Arts Alliance and ExhibitsUSA which will be hosted by numerous galleries across the United States from 2027-2032. Cachia is also a curatorial and disability advisor for a major exhibition being developed about art and disability from the 19th century to the present at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2028.
Cachia’s research, writing, and curatorial work have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Millard Meiss Publication Fund through the College Art Association, and Ford Foundation. She is a recipient of the $50,000 National Art and Disability Award (Established Category) from Creative Australia (2024), and the Irving K. Zola Disability Studies Emerging Scholar Award (2014).
Positive Exposure
Positive Exposure originated from one chance encounter — and one groundbreaking idea.
Rick Guidotti, an award winning photographer, worked in NYC, Milan, Paris and London for a variety of high profile clients including Yves St Laurent, Revlon and L’Oreal. His photography credits spanned household publications like GQ, ELLE, and Harper’s Bazaar. Yet, he worked within the industry’s restrictive conventions. He was always told, who was beautiful!
Rick founded POSITIVE EXPOSURE after a chance encounter in 1997 with a young lady living with albinism at a bus stop in New York City. Albinism is a genetic condition that results with the absence of pigmentation in the hair and skin. As an artist, Rick was taken by her extraordinary beauty. In a quest for a better understanding of albinism, Rick sought out medical textbooks, where he was affronted by the dehumanizing images depicting disease, lacking all humanity. It was this experience which forced Rick to turn his lens from the more traditional ideas of beauty, to the beauty and richness of human diversity. In June 1998, Positive Exposure was launched in a LIFE Magazine cover story entitled “Redefining Beauty.” Guidotti’s five-page photographic essay featured people with albinism and powerful quotes addressing stigma, discrimination, prejudice, hatred and exclusion simply because of a physical difference.
Rick has since spent more than twenty-five years collaborating internationally with advocacy organizations/NGOs, medical schools, universities and other educational institutions to effect a sea-change in societal attitudes towards individuals living with genetic, physical, behavioral or intellectual difference.
Since that initial piece, Rick’s travels have brought him to all 50 U.S. states and over 100 countries, where he has photographed thousands of individuals. Thanks to incredible public response and generous donors, Positive Exposure has transformed into a multi-pronged, global 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
Today, Positive Exposure partners with hundreds of nonprofits, hospital systems, advocacy groups, and educational institutions, creating educational resources and programming to reconstruct societal attitudes towards individuals living with genetic, physical, behavioral, or intellectual difference. We strive to create spaces rooted in unity, respect, and inclusion.
Positive Exposure’s work has been profiled in regional, national, and international media outlets for contributions to human rights, mental health, medicine, and education. It is also the subject of the 2015 acclaimed documentary On Beauty. (Trailer)
