These five artworks by disabled artists show that impairment has served as a creative force throughout art history. Before today’s disability arts movement, lived experiences of disability prompted countless artists to explore interdependence, reimagine existing tools to suit their needs, and emphasize the importance of mechanisms for well-being.

Rebecca Horn: Finger Gloves (1972)

Before the melancholy machinic wonder of Tim Hawkinson’s figurative sculptures, before Stelarc’s half-fantastical, half-grim artificial body extensions of the 1980s, before so many artists made endless variations on partly useful, partly poetic objects that play with the prosthetic, Rebecca Horn made Finger Gloves (1972): two implements, like rakes fitted for hands, seem to stretch their fabric-covered metal fingers more than three feet in length. In Horn’s video performance from 1974, she wears the gloves and walks up and down the middle of an empty room in a slow and careful line, her arms outstretched from her sides. The gloves protract her reach, allowing her augmented body to graze both walls, completely occupying or consuming the cube with an eerie touch.

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