Reviewed by Chanika Svetvilas
What is Hospital Aesthetics? This concept, coined by author Amanda Cachia, is explored in her latest book, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism. Especially potent today in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cachia’s framework reconsiders the hospital not simply as a site of treatment but as a source of artistic production, critique, and activism.
Mention aesthetics and most will assume the reference is to something that is subjectively pleasing to the eye. Like scholar Tobin Siebers, who brought together disability and art to recognize and expand the definition of aesthetics to include disability and embrace the productive friction it generates, Cachia follows suit by pairing aesthetics with the word “hospital” and all it encompasses. In doing so, she demonstrates how art can reconfigure where and how it is created through the lived experiences of hospital settings. Both Siebers and Cachia champion an understanding of aesthetics that engage all the senses. The familiarity of the clinical hospital setting and its accouterments becomes fertile material for disabled artists to create anew. Their work acts as resistance while critiquing the role hospital care plays in their lives. Aesthetics expands to the sensorial aligning with disability’s generative potential.
Rather than positioning disability between the medical model, which seeks to fix disability, and the social model, which emphasizes disabling societal barriers, Cachia foregrounds a care model rooted in interdependence and mutual support. In Hospital Aesthetics, Cachia brings together the disciplines of feminism, disability, and care ethics. Her research draws upon nine contemporary disabled artists and four care collectives alongside her own lived experience as a disabled curator and art historian specializing in disability art activism. The artists she focuses on are primarily those with physical disabilities. Throughout, she writes with an accessible, conversational voice that invites readers into her research.
As the title suggests, the artists profiled intertwine disability, medicine, and activism. The chapters are organized into relationships with the body, medical assistive devices, hospital aesthetics, collectives of care, and alternative forms of medicine.
Cachia presents exhibitions alongside individual artworks and collective practices that emphasize interdependence, mutual aid, and community care. She also traces historical precedents for disability justice and accessibility before such terms entered common use. In doing so, I wonder: do we need a category called “hospital aesthetics”? Rather than imposing another label, Cachia demonstrates how identifying shared artistic strategies among disabled artists can illuminate the relational nature of disability culture.
Hospital Aesthetics is richly illustrated with color plates of work by the featured artists. Artist Dominic Quagliozzi, who was diagnosed at an early age with cystic fibrosis and later received a lung transplant, transforms hospital gowns into canvases while even staging exhibitions from his hospital room, collapsing the boundaries between medical space, artistic production, and activism. Transmasculine multidisciplinary disabled artist, Jesse Luke Darling, similarly reimagines medical assistive devices. In “Collapsed Cane” (2017), a once rigid cane droops and buckles subverting expectations of support, strength, and bodily stability.
The care collectives broaden Cachia’s argument beyond individual art practice. Black Womxn Flourish, founded in Baltimore by queer disabled designer and writer Denise Shanté Brown, centers femmes, transgender, and gender nonconforming people through practices of collective care and self-determination. Here, care is not simply a support system surrounding artmaking but becomes a creative and political practice in its own right.
Because Cachia deliberately limits her study to artists with physical disabilities, perspectives from artists working with psychiatric disability, mental health difference, and Mad Studies remain outside the book’s scope. Considering the histories of psychiatric institutions, medication, coercive treatment, and survivor activism, these perspectives could have further expanded the possibilities of hospital aesthetics.
Hospital Aesthetics is a valuable resource for medical professionals, curators, artists, clinicians, and anyone interested in disability art. Cachia offers a compelling framework that expands our understanding of aesthetics while demonstrating how disability transforms not only artistic practice but also the very ways we think about care, medicine, and creative production.
Title: Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism
Author: Amanda Cachia
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Year: 2025
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About the Reviewer
Chanika Svetvilas is an interdisciplinary artist and has written art reviews for The Amp, an online magazine. For more information about her work, visit chanikasvetvilas.com or follow her on Instagram @Chanika Svetvilas.