Join us for a lecture from Cléa Massiani on Progress Art Studios (PAS); radical spaces that support artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities while disrupting normative assumptions about art, labor, and value.

From the early interest in art within the context of mental illness or Art brut, to the studios’ emergence from deinstitutionalization movements beginning in the 1960s, this talk situates PAS within a lineage of artist-led, independent spaces, alongside organizations like A.I.R., Just Above Midtown, and Southern Exposure, that resisted dominant institutional models of production and exhibition.

Central to this argument is a structural claim: PAS don’t simply critique the art world’s value system from the outside—they build alternative governance models, funding architectures, and staff-curator-artist relationships that materially produce new forms of artistic value and labor.  Massiani locates this history in collaborative projects both inside and outside cultural institutions, using the 1997 exhibition Whipper Snapper Nerd, curated by Harrell Fletcher at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, as an early, pivotal moment.

Creativity Explored is a San Francisco–based nonprofit that supports more than 140 artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities to create, exhibit, and sell their art.