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Ability Imaginary: Against the Productive Subject at Pratt Institute

August 3 – September 18, 2026 All Day

Pratt Institute, Steuben Gallery, Steuben Street, 1st Floor, 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205.

Image detail of a ceramic installation, consisting of hand-sized morsels of pink glazed ceramic made by squeezing clay so that the finger marks of hand making are visible. Each piece is suspended intentionally at different heights from the ceiling with maroon colored thread.
Nawon Kim, Another Body, Dimensions variable, 2025. Installation of 130 ceramic hand sculptures.

Summer hours: Monday–Thursday, 10 a.m.–3 p.m. (Aug 3–Aug 21) 
Regular hours: Monday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
Exhibition Reception: Thursday, September 10, 5 –7 p.m.

Participating Artists

Pratt’s School of Art Dean, Jorge Oliver, invites you to Ability Imaginary: Against the Productive Subject, an exhibition of the work of School of Art and School of Architecture students and recent alumni that engages with the many forms of disability and presents expansive approaches to the meaning of access. This is the fifth collective School of Art exhibition to showcase the work of students and alumni exploring identity in their work and is co-curated by Pratt alum, Rachel Vera Steinberg (BFA Fine Arts, Drawing ‘08) and artist and writer Avram Finkelstein. 

This exhibition takes as its starting point the idea of an ability imaginary, which at its core is freighted with numerous political mythologies. If framed within late-stage capitalism, ability can be seen as code for productivity, or the potential to fulfill useful tasks. If disability is its converse, the legibility of disability is subjected to inverted systems of valuation, by way of productivity’s negation. Or it can be considered to be revolutionary, which is how many artists with disabilities see it. To that end, this exhibition invokes the experience and realities of various disabilities, forging channels of understanding outside of the realm of the visible. Through the work of eleven artists and designers from Pratt’s School of Art and School of Architecture, Ability Imaginary: Against the Productive Subject troubles assumptions about disability’s representation by examining that which goes under-discussed in what defines one who is able.

Some artists in the exhibition use their own memories and haptic experiences to convey new ways of seeing or feeling. Through drawing, collage, and printmaking, Elendë Connor employs her memories of chronic illness along with medical ephemera to illuminate her unique way of seeing. Hannah Estrin connects night blindness with Freud’s theory of the uncanny through their paintings of nocturnal experiences, working with the painting’s surfaces to evoke visual confusion. Youmee Lee’s animation uses the tactile medium of ceramics to carve pictorial representation of poetic ASL phrases that have no direct translation into English. 

Other artists use abstraction and metaphor to create corollaries of experience through their visual languages. Kianaz Shaterian’s abstract paintings and prints point to the relationship between bodies and land, and the subsequent tension between belonging and bodily displacement. Through sculpture, video, sound, and drawing, Nawon Kim explores how somatic awareness is shaped through social observation and memory, making visible the ways that bodies carry their pasts. Her tactile sculptures index corporeal movements, gesturing towards the threshold between habits and confinements, and the un-languageability of experience. Living between two worlds–Uruguay and NYC–Serrana Mattiauda Vasquez’s blown ink painting uses the limits of her exhalations, then anthropomorphizes the ink into faces, capturing a desire for belonging that cannot be described in words. Nora Nucallaj is a printmaker whose work balances the personal with the impersonal–through moody vignettes and tattoos that tell stories of pain, while keeping viewers at a distance, signalling to the protection of one’s own vulnerabilities. 

The remaining artists speak to realities of physical and emotional containments of moving through a world designed for the able, as well as the prosthetic solutions made in tandem. Tiffany Miller has created a physical manifestation of invisible disability through the act of removal, signaling to the extensive bureaucratic pathways through which many need to pass to accommodate various conditions. Through her training as an architecture student, Himani Nahata uses methods of architectural rendering to spatially map a body’s self-defensive movements in order to regulate discomfort. Engaging in the connection between humans and technology, Maxwell Ansell looks to prosthesis in order to extend human’s natural faculties and adjust a body’s possibilities. Finally, through a scale model made of sharpened steel, Suzanne Khalil imagines a psychological space of confinement into sculptural reality. 

The Curators

Rachel Vera Steinberg is the Curator & Director of Exhibitions at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. Her work explores cultural mythologies, science fiction, the role of technology in society, and systemic equity. Previously, she was the Director of SOHO20 Artists and the Assistant Director of NURTUREart. She has curated exhibitions locally and internationally, which have been written about in The New York Times, ArtReview, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. After completing her BFA in Fine Arts from Pratt, she earned an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College.

Avram Finkelstein is an artist, writer, and founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has shown at MoMA, the Whitney, the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, and many other venues. He has written for BOMB and frieze and has been interviewed for The New York Times, NPR, Slate, and other publications. His book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction. 

Pratt Institute provides the creative leaders of tomorrow the professional knowledge and experience to make a better world. A world-class and internationally ranked college with programs in art, design, architecture, liberal arts and sciences, and information studies, Pratt offers nearly 50 undergraduate and graduate degree programs.