Photos by Jake Belcher

CFA Alumni

“The Work I Want to Make”

S. Proski’s art explores blindness and its complexities

Proski (’23), who is blind and uses they/them pronouns, says finding this studio—having a space of their own—has allowed them to “actually think about the work I want to make,” especially the kind of work they want to make as a blind artist. It wasn’t always that way: “I’ve made so many paintings that I’m ashamed of because they remind me of having assimilated to the standards of a sighted culture that doesn’t value me at all.”

Proski feels it is their responsibility as an artist to educate people about blindness. “When I was growing up, things that exist now in terms of literature and accessibility and accommodations didn’t exist for me,” they say, “and I certainly got a lot of pushback about my aspirations to be an artist.”

That pushback had to do, in part, with their desire to pursue painting. “Often, sculpture is what blind people get introduced to when art is an option,” Proski says. “That’s great, and I’m certainly engaged with that dialogue as well. But I also think that the art world and collectively we as people are so obsessed with vision, and vision kind of dominates all of our lives.”

There was a time, Proski says, when they grappled with insecurity over their blindness.

“There’s a lot of doubt that you have as a blind person struggling to exist in a sighted world,” they say. “I do have a little bit of sight left, and, for a long time, I convinced myself that I wasn’t blind because I could still see a little bit. But this is an ongoing thing that many blind people experience, because most blind people have sight left—93 percent of blind people still are able to see something. Being totally blind is actually incredibly rare. So that doubt consumes you. It really changes the way you interpret the world and your surroundings.”

Proski has overcome that insecurity. Now, they’re exploring the spectrum of blindness—and spreading awareness about it—through their artwork.

Multisensory Engagement

At their studio, Proski leads me to their painting Reading Stones for M. Leona Godin. It’s part of a series of works in progress that honor blind people who have inspired them, including Godin, who wrote the book There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness (Pantheon, 2021). 

“It’s a pretty comprehensive cultural analysis of how blindness has been interpreted in literature throughout history, dating back to Homer,” Proski says. “I feel like reading that book really helped me understand not only a lot about myself, but also about what kind of work I am responsible to be making as a blind artist, and what I can do as a blind person to create opportunities for other people in my community.”

For the piece, Proski affixed onto a canvas small squares of painted canvas in a mosaic pattern. (In September, they began a Fulbright grant in Poland to study architectural mosaics and ceramics, subjects that have influenced some of their latest works.)

Two glossy blue orbs that protrude from the top of the canvas appear to stare back at me. These are the reading stones—the earliest kind of magnifiers used by visually impaired people—referenced in the title. Proski encourages me to touch the piece, to engage with these “tiles” of canvas, the smooth reading stones, and other shapes made of poured acrylic paint.

Allowing viewers to interact with their art is not something Proski always embraced. As a CFA student, they created Untitled (disquiet), an eight-by-two-foot boxy structure coated in glossy black resin with braille protruding from its surface. “I was very much like, ‘This has to be pristine. Don’t touch it. I’m going to clean this with Windex every time,’” they recall. “Now, I want more of that evidence of human contact and engagement.”

Earlier this year, when Proski exhibited Untitled (disquiet) in a group show centered around disability at the Design Museum of Chicago, they encouraged people to touch it.

“I’m really interested in what the accumulation of people’s handprints and fingerprints will do to it,” they say.

Many of Proski’s pieces play with texture. Concrete and ceramic shards are arranged in mosaic-like patterns in Little Black Cloud: for Buckley and Seven Curses for Andrew Potok. The former is an homage to Proski’s late cat, Buckley. The painting includes an abstracted cat shape and some of Buckley’s toys scattered about.

The work was an opportunity to introduce another aspect of sensory engagement: smell. “If you get up close, some of [the toys] still smell like catnip,” Proski says. “I like being able to activate nonvisual sensory modalities. Moving forward, I’m thinking about how smell can be a part of a painting.”

Seven Curses for Andrew Potok—named for a painter and an author who gradually lost his sight from an eye disease—is composed entirely of shapes made from poured concrete and acrylic affixed to a panel. The bottom half of the painting is made of scraps of textured concrete covered in acrylic paint in muddy purples and pinks. The textured shards refer to tactile paving, used to assist visually impaired pedestrians. A bit of the bright yellow panel peeks through in spots. The top portion of the composition is made up of fragments of gray-white tactile paving.

“I was thinking about color field, and variations and nuance that could happen within the field,” they say.

The shards all came from a work Proski made at CFA, where they had their classmates walk on concrete shapes they created. The pieces blocked the entrance of the doorway to their critique space, so there was no way to enter the room without walking on—and breaking—the tiles. “I kept all these pieces because I knew I wanted to make paintings out of them,” they say. “I wanted to use the broken pieces of concrete as a prosthetic for a mark that you would make in painting. What I like about the concrete is how it handles and takes the paint. It really soaks it in as soon as it touches it, so you’re constantly having to mess with it to get it to do what you want.”

Along the top of the composition is a line of blue half spheres that Proski made by pouring acrylic into molds. Proski says those half spheres are meant to represent eyes, a recurring motif in their work.

“I feel like gazing eyes are constantly surveilling me, surveilling my existence,” they say. “This is a constant thing that is talked about in disability studies, because you always feel like an ‘other.’ And especially in the context of an art gallery or art museum, you end up feeling like you’re being portrayed as a spectacle to some degree.”

By placing eyes into their works, Proski is turning that sensation back onto the viewer. “These paintings are surveilling you now,” they say. “The blind gaze is also a thing that gets brought up too. People will rudely express, ‘I can’t tell if this blind person is looking at me or not,’ because of the ‘dead stare’ that they have in their eyes. So putting eyes in the work is a way of implicating you and your experience of engaging with these works.”

Seven Curses for Andrew Potok (2024) Acrylic and concrete on panel 48 x 64 x 5 in.

Welcoming the unexpected

Proski has also learned to embrace happenstance when it comes to their art. Once, they were working on a piece in which they affixed concrete tiles to an asymmetrical wood panel. When they lifted the structure to hang it on the wall, most of the tiles fell off.

“I think I was really upset for five minutes, but after I got over it, I quickly realized that this is better,” they say. “There are all these interesting textures that I wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise. That’s been how my practice has evolved a little bit—just letting go.”

Happenstance also led to one of Proski’s most hauntingly captivating pieces, Stargate.

Last winter, they undertook a large-scale commercial ceramic project, which left a lot of dust in the studio. It coated a piece of black canvas that was folded up on the floor. Proski unfurled the canvas, revealing a ghostly, abstract image that looks like a hooded figure.

“With a piece like this, I feel like the subject matter of blindness became tantamount,” they say. “I feel like this gets across, at least for me and my experience of my visual impairments, what is legible versus not legible and how it changes.

“My goal is to educate people about the complexities that exist around blindness, and the struggles that people deal with in terms of having their voices heard, specifically as it relates to artmaking. I think there are more blind people who are interested in art than people want to recognize.”