Six Artists
The Selfie Project
Alan Powell has worked as a visual artist for over fifty years. Throughout his career he has worked with individuals marginalized by intellectual and physical disabilities. Starting in the 1970s, he taught video and photography workshops in Rhode Island state mental hospitals and prisons. In the 1980s Alan worked with the Pennsylvania Department of Education as a consultant/artist for their special education programs.
2017 marked the beginning of Alan’s work creating an annual magazine about the adults participating in Studio 190, a program through The Arc of Delaware County. The “sheltered workshop” concept behind the studio is employing people with disabilities and offering them workplace experience, personal fulfillment, and a community of their own. The activities of Studio 190 Alan began documenting that year were inspired by the individual studio, craft-based practice of past Arc programs across the country, like San Francisco’s in the seventies.
Initially photography was not allowed in sheltered workshops because of regional guidelines restricting outside journalism. Instead, participants took selfies, which were printed on high-contrast paper, then painted on. For the first magazine, Alan compiled the artists’ stories with images he took of their artwork.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic forcing everyone to find ways to continue creating in isolation, later editions of the magazine focused on their homes and monographs on Studio 190’s six most prolific artists. These included Ruth, an acrylic painter (at ninety-two, the oldest connected to the studio); Shannon, producing the largest scale work; and Adrian, working mainly in embroidery.