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 are currently pursuing 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 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. I create work that documents my body, a mix of visceral internal with uncomfortable external using universally human modes of expression, like the breath.
I use various materials to convey the tenuous state of an ill body. I use the sensitive and reactive qualities of porcelain to materially explore what it is like to work with a body that refuses to cooperate. Through each stage, from building with wet clay and releasing from the mold to firing in the kiln and installation, I gently care for each body. I remain firm in caring for it, no matter what failure it faces. The body casts stage a formal conversation with the history of medical casts that prop the body. As I work with the casts, I ruminate on the individual and their experience with disability that they’ve described. I’ve used a mix of my own body and others throughout my sculptures, but as it is all filtered myself, it is both individualistic while also speaking to the broader chronically ill and disabled experiences.
My video work uses my own body to perform the difficulty of living with disability in a disability-phobic social system. With many inaccurate and ableist historical and societal interpretations of the disabled body, I choose to speak about my own experience as a reclamation of my identity. My work continues to express the disabled body through my disabled lens as a gesture toward a comfort that we all seek.
I use various materials to convey the tenuous state of an ill body. I use the sensitive and reactive qualities of porcelain to materially explore what it is like to work with a body that refuses to cooperate. Through each stage, from building with wet clay and releasing from the mold to firing in the kiln and installation, I gently care for each body. I remain firm in caring for it, no matter what failure it faces. The body casts stage a formal conversation with the history of medical casts that prop the body. As I work with the casts, I ruminate on the individual and their experience with disability that they’ve described. I’ve used a mix of my own body and others throughout my sculptures, but as it is all filtered myself, it is both individualistic while also speaking to the broader chronically ill and disabled experiences.
My video work uses my own body to perform the difficulty of living with disability in a disability-phobic social system. With many inaccurate and ableist historical and societal interpretations of the disabled body, I choose to speak about my own experience as a reclamation of my identity. My work continues to express the disabled body through my disabled lens as a gesture toward a comfort that we all seek.