The email about the thesis exhibition lists thirty names. Twenty-one undergraduates, nine graduate students. “Exploring different ideas and materials.” I copy the names into a spreadsheet and start looking for patterns. This is what I do.
Caroline Alba to Franco Lopez, alphabetized by program level. The announcement calls this diversity — painting, sculpture, digital media, “work that combines multiple art disciplines.” But I see the sorting mechanism underneath. Time-based work gets its own category. Physical installations get another. The gallery becomes a diagnostic manual with better lighting.
I know this system. At nineteen, sitting across from a psychiatrist who held a checklist screening for autism. “Do you have intense interests?” Yes. “Do you notice patterns others miss?” Yes. “Do social situations exhaust you?” The questions kept coming until I became a category. The relief of having a name for it lasted exactly three days. Then I realized the name was doing something else.
The Lehman College gallery runs standard hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 to 5. Closed Mondays for installation. The reception happens once — May 20, 5 to 8pm. “Light refreshments will be served.” Every person who can’t manage crowds, fluorescent lights, or evening travel has already been sorted out.
I pull up the gallery’s accessibility page. There’s a ramp. There’s an elevator. Compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which means it meets the minimum legal standard from 1990. The law treats access like a checklist: ramp (check), elevator (check), therefore accessible. But access isn’t a checklist. It’s a question: who gets to be an artist?
Here’s what I notice in the list of thirty names: zero accommodation statements. No mention of alt-text for digital work. No quiet hours. No advance documentation for people who need to preview spaces. The “broad spectrum” only includes people who can navigate the standard format. Everyone else got sorted out somewhere between admission and exhibition.
In 2019, I met an art student who needed the building empty to think clearly while filming her thesis project. So she filmed at 3am, when she could work without distractions. Security knew her schedule. She’d negotiated it like a treaty — emails, meetings, forms. Her work was about urban emptiness. The committee saw the aesthetic choice. They never saw the accommodation.
She got distinction. The next year, they changed the security policy. No more after-hours access. Safety reasons, insurance, liability. Institutions use neutral language like this when they actually mean something else: we designed this for one type of person and that’s who gets to use it.
The thirty artists at Lehman have made it through four years of this sorting. Each one a small victory against systems that mistake compliance for inclusion. Their work gets three paragraphs in a press release. “Identity, memory, technology, migration, and social space.”
The person who wrote that list thinks these are separate categories.
This article was prompted by Lehman College Art Gallery Presents the 2026 Thesis Exhibition from Hyperallergic.