ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how a representative image from The Risk Pictures initiates this model, and how Portrait of Carrie Sandahl: A Project in Four Parts brings it to a full fruition. It suggests how embracing Riva Lehrer's example of exquisite risk can be a powerful means toward promoting further inclusion for all contingent bodies through the arts. It is an exciting time to be engaged with disability arts, particularly where the visual arts are concerned. Access within the arts, for example, has been deployed as a rallying point and as a generative conceit, taken up with verve by disabled artists. A Chicago-based disabled artist who has advanced the purposeful and progressive inclusion of disabled people as the subjects of portraiture. The portraiture method is a circular one, involving extensive interviews with each participant. Lehrer has recreated the disabled body in portraiture with even more complexity, ranging from her own self-portraits to a more symbol-laden series like Totems and Familiars.
