“Constantly falling apart:” A conversation about object permanence with disabled artist Carly Riegger

Detail of Excavate (2025), by Carly Riegger. This art is made of glass, ceramic bits, and pillows.  

Image description: A life cast of a leg casted in glass. Ceramic bits are embedded in the glass of the toes. The foot is broken from the ceramic bits and has visible fragmentation in the glass. The leg rests on a pile of several pillows that are uncovered. 

BY EMMA CIESLIK December 25, 2025

Carly “Car” Riegger is a chronically ill and disabled interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator, and advocate from Ann Arbor, Michigan. They hold an MA in Disability Studies from The City University of New York and are a third year student in the MFA in Studio Art program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They utilize porcelain and installation artworks to express their inner feelings and narratives of disability. 

In spring 2026, they will be curating and featured in two exhibition’s--Outpour scheduled for March 24-28, 2026 in Detroit, Michigan and their thesis exhibition from April 12-24 in Madison, Wisconsin. Ahead of both exhibitions, I sat down with Riegger to discuss the life of a disabled artist and the importance of displaying the work of artists with disabilities, during a time when disabled Americans’ lives are threatened. 

In this interview, Riegger discussed the importance of employing disabled art workers and artists while also avoiding essentializing disabled artists to their identities or seeing them as representatives for the disability community. Riegger also discussed how art created by disabled artists that explores disability often negotiates ephemerality in ways that disrupts the way museums and galleries promote permanence of their collection. 

Note: Riegger uses the term “crip” throughout this interview, including to reference work by other disabled art workers and artists. Like “queer,” many disabled activists have reclaimed the word “crip” which has historically been used as a slur against disabled individuals. Alongside “mad,” a term reclaimed by activists with mental illness, “crip” is a term whose reclamation foregrounds and destabilizes ableist frameworks of bodily autonomy, institutionalization, and productivity.  

Self-Made (2025), by Carly Riegger. This work was created with porcelain, string, and foam.  

Image description: a white porcelain body cast of a torso, strung together with thread with a foam arm hanging at the end. Together they make one body. The porcelain torso is sitting on a cube of foam.

Cieslik: As a disabled, queer person, what led you to create art about your lived experiences? And why is it important to you and disabled museum and gallery visitors’ to see themselves reflected in their art?

Riegger: For me, it happened really naturally. I was really lucky to have a really tiny ceramic studio in my high school and it was my first time working three-dimensionally. I fell in love with it. I also was seeking a diagnosis at the same time I first started working in clay. I had just started experiencing all this chronic pain. I didn’t know how to talk about what was going on besides making it so I immediately started putting it into my work, so it came together organically. 

I realized how little these experiences were talked about and how I don’t see or talk to a lot of people like me in my day-to-day life. I talk to a lot of queer people in art, but I don’t really talk to a lot of disabled people unless it is online. So it has become really important that whenever I speak about my experience, there are more people in the room that can feel and understand and even relate to what I’m talking about, even if they’re not disabled. Disabled artists’ work is important for all of us. We all live in bodies that are kind of constantly falling apart. 

Getting into higher caliber museums, I don’t have a ton of experience, but just showing the work to the public in any capacity has been really important and that leads into why I have been curating shows that are for artists with disability specifically because that just doesn’t happen. I get tired of waiting for it to happen. I’ve mostly organized through galleries or conferences seeking proposals. I put together proposals with at least two others for exhibitions featuring work of disabled artists.  

Chrysalis (2025), by Carly Riegger. This work of art was created using beeswax and a bedsheet.  

Image Description: A body life casted in beeswax, light yellow in color, curled up with leg to stomach, fully folded over, laying in the middle of a swirling white bedsheet. The casted object is half of the body, as it lays on its side, almost sinking into the bedsheet. 

Cieslik: How is the process of creating, displaying, and curating art about disability central to fighting for disability rights and inclusion, in museums and public spaces more broadly?

Riegger: This is something I’ve thought about over the last year especially as I’m starting to make my own shows and working towards my thesis. Material is really important to me, so a lot of the ways that I display things are very precarious and can just fall apart very easily, and to me, that’s speaking to a lot of chronically ill experiences. That directly clashes with museums in how they acquire and showcase art and so it’s been really interesting to imagine a new experience for a space where maybe things intentionally fall apart or are really pushing back against how we expect to see artwork. I’ve been really interested in that, instead of giving into having work that is perfectly preserved.

I’m leaning into pushing back against the institution for museums and this expectation for things to be whole, which is a lot of artwork historically and how we relate it to disability, like if things are broken. I’ve been reading a lot about the Venus de Milo and how the arms have fallen off. People will view that as disabled just because it’s broken, not because it’s like actually disabled or meant to be disabled. I think a lot about incomplete versus whole within the work too. It’s just like a different way of approaching museum spaces but then also the topics that are being talked about like within the work are really important towards the disability rights and inclusion that we’re discussing. 

A lot of that has to do with chronic illness and speaking out about it because typically those experiences are things that people don’t want to hear about, but it’s really important especially when we think about the way that medical spaces take advantage of us. All of us. Right now, we see our health care being taken away.  

Cieslik: On that note, you have organized several important exhibitions for artists with disabilities through the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) including #CripClay in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2023, and you are organizing the upcoming exhibition Outpour in Detroit, Michigan in 2026. What is the importance and impact of exhibiting disabled artists’ work in these spaces and exhibiting them collaboratively?

Riegger: It’s really important that I never work alone on these. It’s usually minimum 3 disabled artist-curators because we all assist each other in keeping up with the work of organizing it. Also, this conference is specifically for ceramics which is then the most important material that I’ve used overall. The #CripClay exhibition was the first one that has ever been for disabled artists through this conference so that was extremely important to have that moment. And I’m now also curating one in 2026, Outpour, that’s a little bit more specific because I think now we can hopefully start building a community and specifying different shows. 

This one is for disabled artists that are working in ceramics using the figure, like me. There are eight of us in total. It builds community within this community, now NCECA has grown to 5,000 members. There’s still not tons of disabled people, but it’s also encouraging more of the conversations like people who are aging within the community now. It’s also being promoted by NCECA which feels exciting to have a moment where we’re thinking about disability when we think about art in context. The theme this year is “Volumes,” so I was thinking about disabled people interpreting the body as a vessel and so that’s why we’re going with “Outpour.” 

Cieslik: How can museums display and collect the art of disabled artists in ways that avoid essentializing the disabled artist and trivializing disabled experience as “inspiring?” How can museums reject and pushback on the idea that disabled artists and museum workers are responsible for educating others on their needs and the needs of their communities?

Riegger: That’s a really important question that I’m also struggling with. I mentioned before that there is something interesting about making work that’s meant to be falling apart and that’s like immediately opposite to how they’re used to collecting. I recommend reading the article: “Crip Materiality” [by Jessica A. Cooley] if you haven’t already. Cooley studied at UW-Madison [University of Wisconsin-Madison] in art history I found out, so I met her and have been thinking about that from the artist’s perspective. The way that the museum started to freak out when that one piece, Soft Screw, was falling apart is so intriguing to me. 

In the same breath, I also want to preserve disabled stories. Using other forms of documentation, like photographs and videos, for example. I go back and forth because half of my work is ceramic like archiving disabled stories and then the other half of my work is really pressing those expectations from the public and museums.  

Uncontained (2025), by Carly Riegger. The glass IV bag was created by Matthew Everett.  

Image description: A porcelain life casted arm hangs from medical tubing next to a glass IV bag that also hangs from medical tubing from the ceiling. They are connected through an IV line and needle that slowly drips water into the arm and through the arm onto a white pillow on the ground. The piece is spotlit in a gallery with darker areas beyond it. It stands in the middle of the cement floor. 

Cieslik: I love that, and I’m curious--how is exploring this crip materiality and disrupting this idea of historical preservation necessarily needing to be permanent materiality part of the work that you do?

Riegger: From that, I’ve taken a look at other materials in a really interesting way, and a lot of the materials that I’m really interested in right now are not ones we probably consider archival. But it’s exciting to me that they could still have their moment and be amazing and then kind of fade away. There’s something more alive about the material, especially shaping it into the figure, truly making something that lives and then falls apart and goes away. We’re talking about disability, but that’s also being human and so I hope that there’s a moment where museums will hear this and see this. I think it might be in the future. It’s really exciting to think about not having one stagnant type of work and the type of way that museums will collect work. 

This train of thought is keeping it out of the “inspiring” vein of disability and putting it into thinking about our bodies themselves.  

Cieslik: It’s interesting because a lot of the work that I’ve done is from the opposite perspective, working in the museum space and collections. Almost to the detriment of the object and the artist, there’s an emphasis that permanency has something to be inherent to the object whether it’s the materials that they use. Often with historical objects, we don’t think about it in that way but with art objects we are, so I think about in relation to spiritual and sacred objects. 

There’s a growing movement that coincides with this that you’re talking about how things don’t necessarily need to live forever. Often things are meant to be burned, destroyed, buried as part of their practice and so I think it’s a really interesting overlap there about the ephemerality not only of bodies but also spiritual meaning. 

Riegger: Yes! It’s really allowed me to think about the body as more resilient, which I think is automatically also counterintuitive to how people think about disability. There are so many similarities to “it’s still structurally sound even though it’s falling apart,” like even those things happening at the same time. Having these opposites at the same time is disability. My body experiences a lot of opposites with chronic illness. That has been exciting to me, and I hope that museums can really see that and be excited about it because I think it could be a really interesting and exciting growing movement that is kind of diverging from how we think about museums.  

Cieslik: This conversation is making me think about how much of overlap there is between anti-ableist philosophies and crip materiality and museums overlaps with the decolonial museum project. So much of the ways in which we root White supremacy and essentialized body is in the idea of permanence, which I think your work challenges. 

Riegger: Yeah, I think growing up I also thought I had to make this lasting impact. I have to make work that lasts forever. I think it’s been exciting to realize that actually by doing the opposite it might have more of an impact on people, at least the people here now. I think that’s really important, especially the more that I reach out and connect with other disabled artists, they understand what I’m doing more than anyone. That connection is really important. 

Protective Shell (2025), by Carly Riegger. This sheet glass piece was featured in the University of Wisconsin glass exhibition titled Coalescence. 

Image description: Seen from an overhead angle, a piece of sheet glass is shaped like a blow mold of the lower torso and flexed leg of a body resting on its side. It casts a gray shadow onto the white rectangular plinth on which it stands, which itself stands on a brown floor. 

Cieslik: One other question I have in this idea of permanence is what is the significance or impact of pieces of your art falling apart and also pieces of your art being separated from the original, especially if things fall off and decay, does it maintain the original value of what it once was or does it become something new entirely? 

Riegger: That’s a great question. I do think there’s a constant becoming, which also is true of disability. I am constantly undergoing chronic pain or changes in the system that is supposed to give me care. So, I do think evolving or changing artwork ends up feeling and behaving differently and I think that’s what’s exciting about it. I’m still getting used to it. I feel like I still have so much internalized ableism and “it has to be this way,” and so I’m constantly battling with that myself. I also have to let go. Constantly challenging assumptions of behavior or being is a part of the work. 

Another really important piece of my work is I’m working with life casts of disabled bodies and so for me, like standing by them, caring for them is also a part of the work. Even after it breaks, I’m not just going to throw it in the dumpster because it’s useless. I’m going to care for it and put it into the finished piece and really it’s more of showing the passage of time, showing things that happened to the body, which unfortunately has been kind of difficult to communicate to non-disabled people. I feel like they’ll see the work and be like, ‘oh, breaking is disability,” which is not what I’m going for. This is already a kind of stereotype of people with disabilities. This is like the hardest part of my work that’s been really upsetting because I feel like there’s something really interesting happening in my work, but then one quick glance, people will be like, ‘oh, disability is being broken.’

I think it’s more what we do with the body as the body is breaking or falling apart that’s really important. A lot of how I process my work is through care, and then also, still loving it after it’s already up and breaking apart. There is intention there and then at the same time, I’m trying to let go of so many expectations.  

Cieslik: I think what you’re saying is so important because it’s talking about the idea that disability or the disabling process itself is not necessarily one of brokenness, but it’s definitely about challenging ideas of utility and productivity and the ways in which completion and preservation are part of our capitalist supremacist structure. 

In conclusion, how can museums and galleries engage meaningfully and ethically in artists with multiple identities, challenging stigma and exclusion within communities--specifically ableism within queer communities and homophobia within disabled communities?

Riegger: This is also a hard question, which is really great. The very first thing that comes to my mind is just museums even having DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] workshops, and so often disability is left out of that. Rarely are we talking about intersections. Like there’s a conversation about race. There’s a conversation about LGBTQ+ community, and then that’s it. There’s not conversations about the intersections. And so even in institutions, universities, and museums, I really want there to be a section on disability because every single person is faced with having a disabled student now and having no idea what to do, and that is true for other communities as well. 

People can pretend that they know how to talk and work with people but then when it comes down to it, the person ends up not having a good experience and so I think the first thing is that they need to educate themselves because there’s so many resources out there. The disabled artists don’t need to be doing the work, and the queer artists, BIPOC artists, don't need to be doing the work.

I think them realizing and discussing the intersection of queerness and disability is really high, or disability with a lot of other communities is really high. It needs to be a more active relationship. It feels like museums are just seeking work and artists are just seeking to show work, and I think that more of the activated side of the relationship needs to happen from the museum side.