Emily Barker

(San Diego, California, 1992 - )

American

Emily Barker has provided the following artist biography: 

"Emily Barker is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles whose work challenges the socially constructed invisible norms in architecture, design, ableism, mass production, health care, and interior spaces that reinforce social “normalcy” and punish those unable to conform. Barker is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, and their work Death by 7865 Paper Cuts (2019), which consists of a stack of medical billing from 2012–2015, was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt (MMK). They have exhibited in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and in the MMK, Frankfurt exhibition Crip Time alongside Mike Kelly, Felix Gonzales Torres and Cady Noland. Barker has given artist talks at the Royal College of Art and Design in London, Otis College of Art and Design, UCLA, and the Whitney Museum."

Barker’s own disability had significantly shaped their art and career. In 2012, while a 19-year old student at the Art Institute of Chicago, they fell four stories inside an improperly secured building. The accident led to paraplegia, a six-month hospital stay, countless operations, chronic pain associated with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. No longer able to pursue other media, Barker shifted into conceptual art. Broadly speaking, they draw inspiration from the traditions of minimalism and the readymade, staging subtle yet stark and poignant encounters with meaningful objects. If minimalism often succeeds by providing viewers with an acute awareness of perception and their own bodies, and readymades succeed by elevating everyday objects into artistic settings that bring heightened scrutiny and awareness, Barker effectively capitalizes on both in bringing viewers into physical proximity with the realities and experiences of disability. 

The remainder of this section is lightly adapted from my letter in support of Barker’s successful application for a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. It is in the first person, unusual for an acquisition proposal, but I think it can provide further illumination: 

I first became aware of Emily’s art through the 2022 Whitney Biennial, which featured Emily’s heat-formed plastic sculpture Untitled (Kitchen) and their neatly stacked compilation of medical paperwork Death by 7865 Paper Cuts. After learning of Emily’s paraplegia and chronic pain from the accompanying label, I found these works to be startlingly clear and arresting. It could likely go without saying that many contemporary artists, writers, and thinkers are deeply concerned with various forms of social identity, and that the prospect of sharing experience across differences in identity related to race, gender, sexuality, and more can be fraught indeed. When it comes to their experience of disability, however, Emily brushes this challenge aside, seemingly with little resistance. To stand in Untitled (Kitchen), with its vertically elongated features and elevated countertops, is to share in the perspective of a seated wheelchair user contending with a literally unreachable yet crucially necessary domestic space. The clear sheets of plastic comprising the structure effectively bring this experience into a realm of conceptual abstraction, so that one is moved to consider not just a single specific case, but a disabled individual’s ongoing and daily struggle, or the broad disregard for physical accessibility in housing nationwide. To read the sheets from Death by 7865 Paper Cuts is to share in the fatigue of a patient facing the labyrinthine bureaucracy of our medical system. One would be hard pressed to say whether the complexity or the dollar amounts are more shocking. A viewer is quite unlikely to make their way through the entire stack, which would seem impenetrable if not for the fact that Emily was themself obligated to make sense of it, and must have somehow managed to do so. 

It is this combination of banality and tremendous effort that led Emily, when asked by Hyperallergic in 2020 to describe a particularly proud accomplishment, to say simply this: “I’m proud of every day I continue to exist, make work, put myself out there, and center my life around trying to make disabled people’s lives better.” Moreover, when asked about their sources of inspiration, Emily responded: “I have no lack of inspiration. My life is incredibly surreal, my friends are incredible, and my experiences are particularly unique. I like to stick to what I know and because of that I will always have a huge queue of works to be made and projects to be completed.” Emily’s life and art are thus inextricably intertwined. Occasions such as the receiving of a medical bill, the failure of a piece of assistive equipment, a fall, an injury, or a social indignity present so many possibilities for work that the opportunities cannot be kept up with. The heat-formed plastic that provides a sense of abstraction also quite concretely provides lightweight material that the artist can handle from their mobility chair. The constraints of government assistance—which provides crucial access to medical care but also requires a limited range of income—shape Emily’s professional career. Emily has expressed that they would not know how to live any other way. Nevertheless, putting these intense and private experiences forward for public appreciation through art is an act of profound generosity and courage. 

Los Angeles, California

View objects by this artist.