Carolyn Lazard

Carolyn Lazard (1987) is an artist and writer based in Philadelphia and New York. Lazard’s practice spans multiple media to address the relationship between care, labor, and value. Their videos and sculptural installations are works that unfold in radically different scales of time and perception: from the almost imperceptible hum of a white-noise machine to a video of the real-time labor of dispensing medications into a weekly pill organizer. Their work consistently probes the limitations of aesthetic perception as a ground for artmaking and questions the value of production in a society defined by exploitation and ability.

Carolyn Lazard received a BA (2010) from Bard College and an MFA (2019) from the University of Pennsylvania. Their work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; MoMA PS1; Museum für Moderne Kunst. Lazard was included in the 2019 and 2024 Whitney Biennial, the 2022 Venice Biennale, and the 2023 NGV Triennial. Lazard is a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow, 2021 United States Artists Fellow, and 2023 MacArthur Fellow.

August – October 2023

Carolyn’s Library
at the Oberon Residency

A Dialogue on Love by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic by Nirmala Erevelles

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century edited by Alice Wong

Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington

The Normal and the Pathological by Georges Canguilhem

The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public by Susan M. Schweik

Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen

Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation by Sunaura Taylor

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

Capitalism and Disability by Marta Russell

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Corpus by Jean-Luc Nancy