Biography
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Carly “Car” Riegger is a chronically ill and disabled artist, writer, curator, advocate, and educator from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their work questions how museums approach permanence, care, and the body, at the same time as it explores the impermanent state of the human body. Riegger has organized multiple important exhibitions for artists with disabilities through the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) including #CripClay in Cincinnati, OH in 2023, and Outpour in Detroit, MI in 2026. Riegger is also the recipient of the 2024 Midwest Artists with Disabilities Award. They hold an MA in Disability Studies from The City University of New York and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Both Riegger’s artwork and career goals involve disability inclusion and rights. They continue expanding how arts institutions engage with disabled artists and how disability studies areas discuss and understand disabled topics by utilizing creative methods.
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Artist Statement
My work is a direct response to my life with multiple chronic illnesses and neurodivergent diagnoses. One of them is Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS), an inherited disorder that causes pain in the connective tissues throughout the body. My work seeks to search for comfort in a world not accommodating of disability. My work spans acknowledging the pain within, the historical oppression, and looking beyond to disabled futurity.
I use various materials to convey the tenuous state of an ill. I choose materials carefully, thinking about their relationship to identity, the body, and the characteristics that shape them. Foam has become and important material linked to my identity of disability and illness while also carrying the qualities I seek in crip materiality. This idea, coined by Jessica A. Cooley, embraces material limits, external and internal pressures, and even failures. I work with materials to discover their unique properties and find the equilibrium between creation by my hand and allowing the material to tell me what it needs. The negotiation between action and limit is materially echoed in the negotiations of having a disabled body in a limiting world.
I use various materials to convey the tenuous state of an ill. I choose materials carefully, thinking about their relationship to identity, the body, and the characteristics that shape them. Foam has become and important material linked to my identity of disability and illness while also carrying the qualities I seek in crip materiality. This idea, coined by Jessica A. Cooley, embraces material limits, external and internal pressures, and even failures. I work with materials to discover their unique properties and find the equilibrium between creation by my hand and allowing the material to tell me what it needs. The negotiation between action and limit is materially echoed in the negotiations of having a disabled body in a limiting world.