Accessing Deaf Art

Brenda Jo Brueggeman

Morris Gayle Broderson (California 1928 - 2011)

Sound of Flower (detail), c.1958

Mixed media

48 x 37 inches (121.9 x 93.9 cm)

Gift of Joan Ankrum

1992.01.002

What is sound, but sensation? The sound of flowers is their smell, the gentle brush of the petal on the cheek and ear. It is also the sensation of a flaming orange sun radiating warmth, a warmth reflected in the slight smile on the figure’s face as they lean down to listen to the flower, an act that may be futile but also brings pleasure through sensation.

It won’t always be easy. Like the ASL sign for access itself, we might have to sneak in and under the thing a bit and have it move toward us as we also attempt to approach it at the same time.

This essay aims to access deaf art by leaning into it, turning it over a bit, and also inviting it to come forward for us. Offering a spotlight first, it chronicles some of the places we can find deaf art and artists—and especially critical, historical, cultural references to them. It also, on the other darker side, suggests reasons for the relative absence of deaf art and artists in the overall critical, historical, cultural canon of American art.

Spotlights and Presence

Jack R. Gannon’s 1981 book, Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America (republished in 2011), devoted an entire chapter (64 pages) to the subject of deaf artists. Gannon’s chapter contains short biographical sketches that are sometimes enhanced by claims made about the art/artists in media or exhibit catalogs and, importantly, a selection of images for each artist’s work. Twenty-six artists are represented there: Hillis Arnold, David Bloch, Morris Broderson, John Brewster Jr., John Carlin, John Louis Clarke, Theophilus Hope d’Estrella, Robert J. Freiman, Louis Frisino, Eugene E. Hannan, Regina Olson Hughes, Felix Kowalewski, Frederick LaMonto, Charles J. LeClercq, Betty G. Miller, Ralph R. Miller, Henry H. Moore, Granville Redmond, William B. Sparks, Kelly H. Stevens, Douglas Tilden, Cadwallader Lincoln Washburn, Tom Wood, Hilbert Duning,

Olof Hanson, and Thomas Marr. Seven of these artists—Bloch, Broderson, Clarke, Kowalewski, LaMonto, Betty G. Miller, Washburn—also have work represented in this exhibit.

In Deborah Sonnenstrahl’s definitive text from 2002 (twenty years ago), Deaf Artists in America; Colonial to Contemporary, she also acknowledges Harry G. Lang and Bonnie Meath-Lang’s 1995 book, Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences as an important beginning and “biographical dictionary”—though it “contains no reproductions of artworks” nor does it necessarily offer critical analysis of the artists and their works.

In a span of twenty years then—from Gannon (1981) to Lang & MeathLang (1995) to Sonnenstrahl (2002)—foundational bricks in the structures of deaf art and artists in America were laid down using biographical notes, chronologies of exhibits, major artistic achievements, and some critical commentary and “a closer look” (Sonnenstrahl) at interpreting some of the art. Gannon and Sonnenstrahl also significantly included visual images of some of the artwork itself.

Despite a good number of events, exhibits, movements around deaf visual art (see below), a way to see, interpret, define, represent deaf (visual) art is still more or less missing and unwritten. Sonnenstrahl articulates these issues of absence—even from 20 years ago—in the introduction to her definitive Deaf Artists in America text:

There is no literature on the unique aesthetic of deaf artists… Seminal questions remain unanswered: how do artists see their world, how do deaf artists interpret their world, how do deaf artists define their world, and finally how do deaf artists represent their world? [italics mine] (xxiii)

The elements of this exhibit do some important work forward in trying to answer some of Sonnenstrahl’s key questions.

Since Sonnenstrahl’s foundational 2002 text, other sources have also appeared that make significant critical and creative contributions to the work, study, scope of deaf art/artists in America. Earlier featured texts about specific deaf artists offer different elements of insight and engagement. In 1988, for example, Vivian Alpert Thompson crafted an essay about deaf artist, David Bloch, and his harrowing, haunting, and vivid Holocaust artworks. Thompson’s essay appears her collection, A Mission in Art: Recent

Holocaust Works in America; she outlines Bloch’s artistic career overall before engaging a more detailed analysis (in short form) of 29 different Holocaust-centered artworks by Bloch, folding out from the Dachau concentration camp. Thompson notes, for example, that all of these paintings were 13” x 48”—“a unique and demanding size, but one meant to be symbolic of the boxcars that transported the Jews to the death camps.”

Also in the same year, March 1988, the U.S. Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art completed a long (and rather disturbing and grilling, at points) “oral history interview” with Morris Broderson. Broderson’s lifelong agent and partner, Joan Ankrum, not only participates in the interview but sometimes controls many parts of it while the Smithsonian Institute interviewer, Paul Karlstrom repeatedly tries to rivet the conversation back to a forced reading of the impact of Broderson’s “isolation” and deafness. But Broderson will have little to do with that narrative, telling us instead that “I was not unhappy. I went up to the mountain to go swimming…” And when his agent/friend (Ankrum) later tries to directly suggest, in conversations about Broderson’s drawings that feature Anne Frank, that “you were locked up because of your hearing”... he quickly and directly replies “Not that locked up.” And too, late in the interview, Smithsonian interviewer

(Karlstrom) questions if he (Broderson) was “alone… an artist not connected to all those other wonderful artists in the world? Are you isolated? Are you an individual, or do you feel connected with other artists?” At this “isolation” probing, Broderson turns that conversation around another way: “I’m the artist. I want to be Broderson. Not like the other artist’s work. I do my own way, to see what I like doing. That’s part of my life. I’m Morris Broderson of art.”

Much of this historic Smithsonian interview seems to work toward enforcing a circumscribed and stereotyped identity–and a script of isolation and being “locked up.” There are other examples beyond the ones I’ve quoted here. And Broderson’s deaf identity is not the only one that seems to be questioned and attempted to uncloak in this interview. But Broderson won’t let it/them isolate, uncloak, or lock him up. This troubling interview plays out a particularly locked, scripted, and isolating way of imagining deaf art and deaf artists in the late 1980s (just as the March 1988 Deaf President Now protests are erupting on the national and global scene).

Aside from the essay on David Bloch and the Morris Broderson interview with the Smithsonian, other wide public access to some deaf artists appears on Wikipedia or in blogposts. See, as a few good examples, the Wikipedia entry for Cadwallader Lincoln Washburn or the Geneva Historical Society blogpost entry (2015) on “Deaf Artist Francis Tuttle.”

Circa 1989, and in connection with the first international Deaf Way global event, a new and groundbreaking entity related to Deaf Artists in Amer-

Self Portrait, 1983

Oil on canvas

27.25 x 21.25 inches (69.2 x 53.9 cm)

1984.01

Lighthouse Pier, Seneca Lake, n.d.

Oil on canvas

8.5 x 21 inches (21.5 x 53.3 cm)

On loan courtesy of Historic Geneva ica makes the scene: De’VIA. Defining its existence as “an art movement formed by Deaf artists to express their Deaf experience” and shorthanding for “Deaf View Image Art,” DeVIA’s impact is still being felt, in ripples and repeated waves, throughout the 21st century Deaf community and culture.

Deaf artist and DeVIA manifesto maker, Chuck Baird, chronicles De’VIA’s role in “A History of Deaf Art” in a 2004 publication arising from Utah Valley State College’s “Deaf Studies Today!” conference. Baird’s lively narrative history outlines twelve different events and websites devoted to the coming out of American Deaf Art from 1989-2004. He especially credits Betty G. Miller as “being the first Deaf artist to expose the country to the genre” since “she had a strong and clear vision of what she was doing.” Baird also suggests in this essay that “in the Deaf community, visual arts, too, were the last to emerge” (in social and cultural changes).

Also stemming from that same Utah Valley State College “Deaf Studies Today!” conference, Patti Durr offers a meaningful contribution on “Investigating Deaf Visual Art.” Durr opens with five (5) “main characteristics of Deaf culture: language, behavior/norms, values/beliefs, tradition/ heritage, and possessions” (167). Durr also laments that “unfortunately a critical component of Deaf cultural possessions—art—is often overlooked or uninvestigated” (167). This current exhibit expands out from, and addresses, Durr’s lament as it intends to look over and deeply investigate the critical cultural possession of art for the not only the American Deaf community but also for the American arts community overall.

In 2016, SAGE publications produced the Deaf Studies Encyclopedia (Editors, Boudreault and Gertz). This groundbreaking publication included three different entries devoted to deaf art/artists: Art Genres & Movements (pages 40-42); Deaf Art (pages 149-165); and Deaf Professionals in American Art Museums; (pages 264-266). The Deaf Art entry (written by Wylene Rholetter) references many significant early deaf American artists who are not included in this exhibit: John Brewster Jr. (1766-1854), William Mercer (1765?-1839), George Catlin (1796-1872), Charlotte Buell Coman (1833-1924), The Allen Sisters (1854-1941), Theophilus Hope d’Estrella (1851-1929). Finally, in that encyclopedia, a rich and longstanding history of deaf people working in American Art Museums—written by Deborah Sonnenstrahl Blumenson—also outlines how deaf curators and museum workers have long been a part of creating accessible and alternative paths to accessing American art overall.

In 2005, the Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf (RIT/NTID) opened the Deaf Art website, substantially increasing the options for access to deaf art. Partly curated and reviewed but also somewhat “open-access,” the Deaf Art website maintains that “this site features over 100 Deaf and hard of hearing artists and numerous resources and materials” and indicated certain submission criteria. As an ongoing site of both public and educational engagement, the site currently features six main areas: Artists; Deaf Art; Students Self-Portraits; Articles; Videos; Resources.

New opportunities and elements for Deaf Art in America exist through several recent ventures in the last decade. In 2014, the Deaf Artists Residency Program (DAR) at The Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN was initiated, the only residency opportunity in the world devoted exclusively to Deaf artists. Running on a two-year cycle, the DAR has currently been through five cycles of artists-residents. Likewise, the Deaf Professional Artists Network (DPAN) has been thriving in the world of media/TV/ popular communications, including such things as fully sign-performed, artistic, lively pieces from the 2021 Super Bowl halftime show. That the Super Bowl, like several before it, also featured incredibly artistic performances—by deaf artists—for the Star Spangled Banner: most recently Christine Sun Kim in 2021 and Wawa in 2022.

Shadows and Absence

And yet, despite the 2021 Super Bowl spotlights, Deaf art and artists still reside in some shadows and absences. In preparing to do this work, I accessed half a dozen of the most popular textbooks in the history of American art. Deaf art was (Of course? Of course! Of course…) nowhere to be found in them.

It was also missing (with some alarm, some concern, some questions) from the important Through Deaf Eyes book that accompanies the two-hour PBS documentary film—though the film itself features some performance art and short film spotlights by deaf filmmakers.

American Art has always been critically challenged, and sometimes clearly troubled, with indicating and allying diverse identities related to the subject or production of the art. It’s an uneasy space, at best. In the fifteen years I’ve been working with James Castle’s art (in numerous ways), I have noted time and again how unsettled it can make curators, critics, the media, and the general exhibit-going audience to bring the question of Castle’s

Untitled, n.d. Soot, saliva, and color of unknown origin on found paper

3.5 x 6 inches (8.8 x 15.2 cm)

Purchased through the Permanent Collection Acquisition Fund

2021.12.001 deafness to the center of the conversation. While his deafness was often used by critics and the media as a kind of spectacular spotlight to flash cleverly in a title, no one seemed to want to really talk or think about how Castle’s embodied deafness mattered in his art making and objects. As a counter to this discomfort over Castle’s deafness, I made it the central focus of my 2013 curated exhibit, Constructing James Castle, in the Columbus, Ohio Urban Arts Space; I carry that conversation comfortably forward even more directly in the 22-minute film, Constructing James Castle, I made about the exhibit.

There are a series of these box figure doll-like portrait images in Castle’s work. They all seem to evoke the classroom setting at the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind. They are created on found paper and (most) use color—which Castle sometimes created from colored pencils or from chewing down cartons and labels of colored materials (like ice cream cartons) and then re-applying that masticated material in his drawings. The smaller figures seem to represent other students at the school and the larger figure to the left, in green, seems to represent a teacher. Although Castle was only at the school for five years (19101915) it seems to have played a major role in his memory and his sense of friendship, sociality, and connection.

As my former art education/art practice and disability studies colleague, John Derby, conveys in a groundbreaking piece about the intersections of art education and disability studies (2012), the crossings between art practices, art education, and deaf/disability studies are potent and prolific. In his 2012 essay, Derby proposes five ways that disability/deaf art practices can contribute to, intervene with, rewrite American art at large, because:

1. Art Addresses Identity

2. Art Practices Are Social, Cultural, And Critical

3. Art And Visual Culture Can Be Transdisciplinary

4. Visual Culture Is Narrative

5. Art Making Can Performatively Interact With Spaces As Tactics

The anxiety of identity that perhaps over-narrates the story of deaf art and artists in America is no small thing to set aside; such anxiety can leave deaf artists and their art work in the shadows, absent. Instead of shadows and absence, this exhibit carries out Derby’s five proposed ways: it helps bring out the shape of American deaf identities; it shows the transdisciplinary potential of deaf art; it explores the visual-cultural-narrative in that art, and it demonstrates the dual performance of being deaf, being American in social, cultural, and critical spaces. Sometimes that shape is spotlighted and sometimes it is only shadowed in the art exhibited here.

When we access deaf art, as we do in this exhibit, we can begin answering those “seminal questions” Sonnenstrahl set out for us twenty years ago: “how do artists see their world, how do deaf artists interpret their world, how do deaf artists define their world, and finally how do deaf artists represent their world?” (xxiii)

Works Cited

Deaf Art, 9 August 2018, https://deaf-art.org/. Accessed 17 April 2022.

DPAN.TV – The Sign Language Channel, https://dpan.tv/. Accessed 18 April 2022.

“access-[ENTER-ENTER] / accessible.” YouTube, 23 June 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNW5xUz_v9E. Accessed 17 April 2022.

Askins, Alice. “Deaf Artist Francis Tuttle.” Historic Geneva, 26 June 2015, https://historicgeneva.org/people/ artist-frances-tuttle/. Accessed 17 April 2022.

Boudreault, Patrick, and Genie Gertz, editors. The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia. SAGE Publications, 2015. Accessed 17 April 2022.

Brueggemann, Brenda. “Constructing James Castle | Urban Arts Space.” Urban Arts Space, https://uas.osu.edu/ events/james-castle. Accessed 18 April 2022.

Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, director. Constructing James Castle. Dandelion Pictures, 2013, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=PNuTZJ8OTYY. Accessed 18 April 2022.

“Cadwallader Lincoln Washburn.” Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadwallader_Lincoln_Washburn. Accessed 17 April 2022.

“Christine Sun Kim Performs the National Anthem / Super Bowl LIV.” YouTube, 3 February 2020, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2TCT5HYlHQ. Accessed 18 April 2022.

“Deaf Art: De’Via.” Silent Voice, 9 February 2021, https:// silentvoice.ca/deaf-art-devia/. Accessed 17 April 2022.

“Deaf Artists Residency Program.” Anderson Center at Tower View, https://www.andersoncenter.org/residency-program/dar/. Accessed 18 April 2022.

Derby, John. “Art Education and Disability Studies.” Disability Studies Quarterly, https://dsq-sds.org/article/ view/3027/3054. Accessed 18 April 2022.

Eldredge, Bryan K., et al., editors. Deaf Studies Today! A Kaleidoscope of Knowledge, Learning, and Understanding: Conference Proceedings, Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah, April 12-14, 2004.

Deaf Studies Today! American Sign Language and Deaf Studies Program, Utah Valley State College, 2005. Accessed 17 April 2022.

Gannon, Jack R. Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America. Edited by Laura-Jean Gilbert and Jane Butler, Gallaudet University Press, 2011.

Lang, Harry G., et al. Deaf persons in the arts and sciences: a biographical dictionary. Greenwood Press, 1995.

“National Anthem in ASL at Super Bowl LV.” YouTube, 8 February 2021, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=HRtDjTQHG-g. Accessed 18 April 2022.

“Oral history interview with Morris Broderson, 1998 March 11 and 13 | Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.” Archives of American Art, https://www.aaa. si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-morris-broderson-12187. Accessed 17 April 2022.

Sonnenstrahl, Deborah M. Deaf artists in America: colonial to contemporary. DawnSignPress, 2002.

Thompson, Vivian Alpert. A Mission in Art: Recent Holocaust Works in America. Mercer University Press, 1988.

Durr, Patti. “De’VIA: Investigating deaf visual art.” RIT Scholar Works, https://scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1424&context=article. Accessed 17 April 2022.

Citizenship

Octavian Robinson

Helen Dyer

(Florida 1911 - 2001)

New England Village, 1960

Oil on canvas

22.75 x 18.75 inches (57.7 x 47.6 cm)

Dyer Arts Center Founding Collection

2006.03.002

Popular memory within deaf cultural communities and many historical narratives about American deaf cultural history begins in 1817 with the founding of the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut. The 1817 narrative is only part of a larger complex and multilayered history of deaf peoples in the United States. Historians have countered that deaf histories, signed languages, deaf cultures and communities existed prior to 1817; schools for deaf children were not a prerequisite for community formation. Deaf people, by genetics or by choice, would find ways to congregate. Enclaves of signing communities, due to intergenerational deafness in the local genetic pool, existed in places like Henniker, New Hampshire and Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod. Vibrant signing communities where deaf people were integrated into local communities were present before the founding of ASD. However, the 1817 narrative remains popular as the origins story of the deaf cultural community in the United States because schools intentionally brought together deaf people in sufficient numbers that a standardized language flourished, where political power coalesced, and deaf people’s integration in society was affirmed by the state.

As an origins story, the 1817 founding of ASD by Laurent Clerc, deaf Frenchman, and two hearing people, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Mason Fitch Cogswell, reveals much about the attitudes, values, anxieties, and tensions experienced by deaf people in the United States. The story emphasizes the importance of Gallaudet choosing to bring Clerc and the

French deaf educational method to the United States instead of the oral method that first brought Gallaudet to the Braidwood School in Scotland in search for a solution to a social and spiritual problem. The education of deaf children and their exposure to Christianity. The story also highlights Clerc’s adventurous nature and excellent negotiation skills. He negotiated a good salary for himself, secured his freedom to practice as a Catholic in Protestant America, and the means to return to France should Gallaudet’s venture not work out. Clerc, with Gallaudet and Cogswell, secured public financial support for the school, making ASD the first permanent school for deaf children in the United States. In short, the origins story emphasizes signed language as the right and moral choice, highlights language and education as central to deaf people’s agency, and reveals expectations for deaf people as citizens. Those tropes remain dominant in deaf cultural narratives into the 21st century. This origin story illustrates also the importance of schools for deaf children across the globe as cradles of signed languages, foci of deaf communities, and incubators of deaf political thought.

The modern standardized version of American Sign Language (ASL) is a product of the coalescing of regional and national deaf communities throughout the United States schools for deaf children, deaf organizations and clubs, and Gallaudet University along with broader changes in U.S. society such as the expansion of rail networks and urbanization. The early origins of ASL is traced back to ASD where Laurent Clerc brought Langue des Signes Française (LSF) to Hartford, teaching Thomas Gallaudet the language during their voyage to the United States. Clerc’s LSF combined

James Castle (Idaho 1899-1977)

Untitled, c.1930

Soot and spit on cardboard tea carton

3.5 x 4.5 inches (8.8 x 11.4 cm)

On loan courtesy of Rob Roth and John Berg

Castle’s drawings of the Idaho

School for the Deaf and Blind in Gooding are created from memory but all are astonishingly accurate. He attended the school from 1910-1915 (ages 10-15) and was sent home as “illiterate and ineducable.” Yet the importance of the school as a place of profound connection for him resonates through his many drawings. This drawing was made on recycled paper from his parent’s general store and done with soot (gathered from family and neighbor’s wood stoves) mixed with his own saliva and etched with his own self-made, whittled wood sticks. All of these elements convey Castle’s connection to his community and sociality. Castle almost always made his art from recycled materials. The soot and saliva drawing here was a medium he often used for drawings of the school and the local Idaho landscape at large. The medium of local soot and his own saliva on recycled paper conveys nostalgia, deeply embodied interaction, and a seeming direct simplicity.

Helen Dyer

(Florida 1911 - 2001)

Playing Checkers, 1961

Oil on Canvas

22 x 18 inches (55.8 x 45.7 cm)

Dyer Arts Center Founding Collection

2006.03.004 with the signed languages that the pupils at ASD brought with them from signing enclaves, Henniker and Martha’s Vineyard, home signs from home, and contact signed languages such as those learned from local indigenous populations. Those languages evolved together through use, growing through regional and national gatherings of deaf people in both permanent and temporary spaces such as schools for deaf children and biennial national conferences. Within half a century of ASD’s founding, regional and state associations and alumni associations, and many local deaf clubs were founded. By 1880, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) was founded, followed by the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf (NFSD), a national insurance company that also functioned as a social organization for deaf men, in 1901. Those organizations, clubs, schools, and later, factories with large numbers of deaf workers became critical sites of linguistic transmission and deaf political organizing.

However, many of those schools and organizations were not inclusive. Segregation in deaf schools, and especially the exclusion of Black students, were prevalent through the late 20th century. The NAD and NFSD both explicitly prohibited Black members until the mid 20th century; both organizations also had limited roles for women. Women, white and non-white, were also either excluded or highly restricted in access to beat organizations as communal linguistic spaces. Women, who otherwise satisfied the racial exclusion policies, were often welcomed into organizations to perform gendered labor like organizing social events, managing social relations and charitable service projects, and providing refreshments for everyone at meetings and events.

The growth of deaf communities organized around formal spaces and organizations meant that American Sign Language had brought together a unified linguistic community that encouraged habits of being and values centered on signed languages.

A common language allowed social and mutual aid communities to flourish. A common language also generated a space for cultural blossoming. A culture can be described as a habit of being in the world. A shared language in an uncommon modality meant a unique culture rooted in a different orientation to the world. This unique culture produced literary and artistic traditions that highlighted the beauty and value of ASL. This emphasis makes clear that signed languages are important, not only for communication, but representative of the value of language itself for agency and belonging.

Throughout this narrative about the development of ASL, deaf education, and deaf communities, the value of ASL is highlighted as the major overarching theme of deaf cultural history. Historically, signed languages have been an important political issue for deaf people. Since the early 19th century, deaf thinkers, writers, and political figures made the claim that signed languages were critical to deaf people’s agency and served as their best pathway to belonging as citizens.

Leaders of the National Association of the Deaf argued that education was important for deaf people’s status as citizens. First, the state’s investment in deaf education meant that society viewed deaf people as potential citizens. As citizens, they would be expected to participate in the workforce and in political discourse, be granted rights and freedoms like their hearing counterparts, and given opportunities for social advancement. They did

Portrait of Betsey White, 1939

Oil on canvas

30.5 x 24.5 inches (77.4 x 60.9 cm)

Gift of Elizabeth “Betsey” White 2006.11.001

Dyer

Mixed media

22.75 x 26.5 inches (57.7 x 67.3 cm)

2006.03.008 not stop at this logic. Education alone was not enough. This investment was moot if the outcomes did not produce intelligent, independent, selfsufficient deaf adults. Leaders argued this education had to be accessible. For deaf children, this meant education in signed language, which would be fully accessible and serve as a pathway to English literacy, employment, and political power. Language allowed for deaf people’s agency as empowered actors and as active participants in the public sphere.

However, there was much pushback against signed languages in the 19th century rooted in racist, ableist, and colonial logics. Those ideas, combined with the racial hierarchy and gendered inequities in the United States, meant that deaf people encountered many attempts to eradicate the existence of deaf communities, cultures, and signed languages. This included efforts to close deaf schools, enact oral mainstream programs that isolated deaf children from each other, prohibit marriages and limit reproductive freedoms, and prohibitions on signed languages in deaf education. Language suppression led to language protectionism, which in turn meant ugly politics surrounding citizenship and worthiness. Who was worthy of belonging? Deaf leaders of organizations and signing schools were generally conservative in their politics.

Whiteness is largely unmarked in this essay because whiteness itself was a shifting category throughout the 19th century and early 20th century. At times, some of the leaders of the organizations were not considered white by the standards of their time. This essay instead marks anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity when and where it appears to show the processes of the consolidation of whiteness within deaf political spaces. Essential to those discourses was the value of employment and self-sufficiency.

Deaf people were expected to work, avoid vagrancy, and be taxpaying citizens. Avoiding vagrancy specifically meant avoiding becoming public charges. A deaf person should not depend on society (or their local communities) for material support. Deaf communities formed mutual aid societies like the Ladies’ Aid Society of Chicago to provide support for deserving deaf people who might need community assistance. Those efforts were to protect the reputation of deaf schools as successes, especially those that used signed languages. Gainful employment and status as taxpayers lent deaf people legitimacy as contributing members of society. This perception afforded deaf leaders some degree of political power to advocate for deaf education, signed language, and civil rights for deaf people. Social pressures surrounding class, gender, and race meant the adoption of respectability politics, moral panics over the future of deaf children, and the reproduction of social structures within deaf spaces such as racism, sexism, and lateral ableism. For this reason, deaf organizations worked very hard to distance deaf people from other deaf-disabled people, shunned peddlers, outcast beggars, and often refused to advocate for equal educational access or civil rights for Black deaf people.

This vein of respectability politics continued throughout the 20th century and persists in the 21st. In the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis hit, deaf communities viewed the AIDS crisis as a gay problem mirroring much of American society. Public and sexual health education was not made accessible to deaf people who remain twice as likely to be infected with HIV, yet this remains a little discussed issue among deaf people. Which makes Harry Williams’ work even more so striking. Despite popular notions, it is a misconception to understand the deaf communities in the United States as monolithic. What the above illustrates is that even among this microcosm of American society, we find a group who reproduced, refracted, and maintained broader status quos. A close study of dominant strains of deaf history exposes ideas about worthiness of belonging and citizenship. The histories of deaf communities in the U.S. shows us how language functions as an axis for understanding the experience of power, privilege, belonging, and citizenship.

Harry Williams (Ohio 1948 - California 1991)

ABC ASL Peddler Card, n.d.

Oil on canvas

23 x17 inches (58.4 x 43.1 cm)

Gift of Malinda Mangrum

2021.09.024

Deaf peddlers are an iconic–and troubled and complicated–part of the American deaf community and history. Williams captures here the bleak and desolate background and the rising hope of the deaf peddler’s ABC card (for income, sociality, recognition in the larger hearing community and U.S. economy) that is pinned and floating above that starkness.