Park McArthur
Park McArthur (born 1984, North Carolina, USA) is an artist living in New York City who works in sculpture, installation, text, and sound. McArthur is a wheelchair user whose work uses this position to inform her art. Life and work. McArthur graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the University of Miami in 2009 and studied at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program, 2011–2012. About McArthur's 2014 exhibition "Ramps", wherein the artist exhibited the wheelchair ramps of institutions with which she had previously worked, writer Andrew Blackley said, "The exhibition displayed the  means by which institutions both produce and deny access. Each ramp challenged reappraisal and reinforced a set of past and future foreclosures. ‘Ramps’ enlisted generative, generous responses to the negativity of the institution, to the point of engendering the reproduction of those very negative characteristics (by removing the objects’ previously assumed ‘function’). By extension, at stake and always under threat are the threaded relationships between queerness and disability, the breakdown of their concomitant binaries and the temporality of care." In 2015, McArthur addressed Felix Gonzalez-Torrez's ""Untitled" (Love Letter From the War Front)" in Whitney Museum of American Art , Lower Manhattan, New York. McArthur's work has been described as questioning of "care alongside questions of autonomy and dependency" in regards to the daily experience of disabled individuals. McArthur uses her work to challenge the status quo and give those who are usually marginalized by societal structures a voice. Her choice of medium are sculptures and installations that "conceptually driven and often composed of utilitarian materials such as blocks of foam or a Wikipedia entry." Her works elicit an “experience of activism and jerry-built ingenuity.” In 2014, McArthur won the Wynn Newhouse Award, an annual prize given to  disabled artists in recognition of their artistic merit. In 2015, McArthur was an Artadia Awardee. McArthur is represented by Essex Street Gallery in New York.