Please note that we acknowledge both identity first and person first framing of disability identity. When we use the phrase “disabled artists,” we intend to align with the Social Model of Disability understanding that people are disabled by environmental and societal barriers.
Arts Midwest is thrilled to announce the nine recipients of the 2025 Midwest Award for Artists with Disabilities, chosen from more than 400 submissions. This award supports accessibility in the arts and celebrates the exceptional contributions of disabled Midwestern visual artists.
This year’s awardees are:
- Jennifer Bock-Nelson (Quincy, Illinois)
- Johnson Simon (Indianapolis, Indiana)
- Lucas Delaney (Dubuque, Iowa)
- Nicholas Harrier (Essexville, Michigan)
- Natalija Walbridge (Duluth, Minnesota)
- Jane Gaffrey (West Fargo, North Dakota)
- Tabeena Wani (Athens, Ohio)
- Brianna Wiersema (Mitchell, South Dakota)
- Rebecca Kautz (Sun Prairie, Wisconsin)
Each artist will receive $3,000 in unrestricted support to continue their artistic journey.
“This year’s awardees are quilting, welding, collaging, and even transforming prosthetics into art pieces,” says Grants Manager John Kaiser. “Their work shows just how expansive Midwestern creativity is, and the powerful role disabled artists play in shaping the arts.”
Established in 2022, the Midwest Award for Artists with Disabilities is supported by the James Edward Scherbarth and Paul Francis Mosley Giving Fund. The award honors the late James Edward Scherbarth, an award-winning visual artist, teacher, and advocate for arts access who believed that creativity lives in everyone and dedicated his career to helping people express themselves through art.
Join us in celebrating the creativity these artists bring to the Midwest, and explore some of their works below:
Jennifer Bock-Nelson (Quincy, Illinois)
My disability is Tourette’s Syndrome. I developed motor and vocal tics as a child, which have ebbed and flowed during adulthood. I discovered as a child that making art is a way for me to get out of my physical body and enter a flow state. I also have OCD and depression as accompanying symptoms of Tourette’s.
I find my work fulfills a need to balance order with chaos. For the past seven years, I was a working artist. I am now returning to education in the role of an art professor at a small liberal arts college.
My work is about perception and how we see. In addition to teaching methods of painting and drawing, I help all students learn to see and experience the world around them. I make a concerted effort to help neurodivergent students embrace their unique way of seeing.
Johnson Simon (Indianapolis, Indiana)
My name is Johnson Simon. I am a Haitian-born artist living with cerebral palsy, and I use painting to express the movements my body cannot.
My art is an extension of my lived experience—vivid, resilient, and deeply rooted in culture. Each piece I create celebrates my Haitian heritage and the stories of people who, like me, have overcome adversity.
My goal as an artist is to make the invisible seen. I want to inspire others by showing that disability is not a limitation—it’s a lens for unique creativity. Through bold colors, layered textures, and cultural symbolism, I explore identity, pride, and joy. My slogan, “My Art is My Movement,” guides me as I use my brush to speak when words fall short.
My work has recently grown through public recognition and community programs. I’ve been honored with a residency at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and a community grant from the City of Fishers to teach youth and families. These opportunities allow me to expand the reach of my art and fulfill my mission: to educate, uplift, and connect through visual storytelling.
Lucas Delaney (Dubuque, Iowa)
My recent works are an expression of survival, identity, and the complexities of grief. As a disabled, transgender artist raised in the Deep South and specifically in a strict religious and military-influence household, I use art to process my life experiences with themes of disconnection, trauma, chronic illness, memory loss, and transformation, just to name a few.
Grief, both personal and collective, is central to my work. I create to hold space for the layered emotions that come with loss, identity shifts, and living in a body that doesn’t always cooperate.
My most recent works are primarily layered collages (mixed-media) and utilize lots of various platforms and tools, beyond creating things 2-dimensionally, like Procreate, Canva, and sometimes AI, to adapt to my cognitive disabilities while still creating emotional, layered visual pieces.
My goal is to make art that is expressive, accessible, and affirming—for myself and others. I center queer and disabled narratives, designing with inclusion in mind, so that people who are often overlooked in traditional art spaces can see themselves reflected.
Ultimately, my work is about making meaning from hard experiences, pain and, offer connection through vulnerability. I want others to feel seen, validated, and less alone.
Nicholas Harrier (Essexville, Michigan)
As an artist, my primary goal is to transform perceptions of disability through custom prosthetic covers that blend functionality with bold, unapologetic design. I aim to create wearable art that reflects individuality, resilience, and the power of self-expression. My work is rooted in the belief that mobility aids shouldn’t be hidden or neutral—they should be celebrated as extensions of identity.
I design and build every piece free of charge, ensuring that cost is never a barrier to self-expression. Each cover is a collaboration with the wearer, tailored not just to their physical form but to their personality, story, and cultural influences. Whether drawing from pop culture, mythology, or abstract forms, I strive to create designs that empower the user and spark conversations about ability, aesthetics, and agency.
This work is deeply personal. As an amputee, I understand the complex relationship between visibility, vulnerability, and pride. My designs are an expression of my goal to challenge shame and stigma by elevating prosthetics into the realm of fine art and fashion.
Natalija Walbridge (Duluth, Minnesota)
As a fabric collage artist, I create layered textile compositions that celebrate the quiet beauty of Minnesota’s natural world. From my studio on Park Point in Duluth, I draw inspiration from the wildlife and native plants I encounter in local wetlands and forests. Each piece begins with a fleeting moment—like a mink bounding across a log or a wood duck taking flight at dawn—and becomes a richly textured fabric narrative.
I build depth, texture, and movement using hand-dyed fabrics. This slow, meditative process allows me to reflect the rhythms of nature and cultivate a sense of connection and care for the environment.
In addition to gallery shows, I’m passionate about creating public installations in spaces where people are already inspired to engage with the natural world—places like Split Rock Lighthouse, the Great Lakes Aquarium, and Sky Harbor Airport, which is adjacent to an old-growth forest on Park Point. These settings offer meaningful opportunities to connect my work with the landscapes and wildlife that inspire it.
My goal is to spark curiosity, foster environmental awareness, and remind viewers that beauty and wonder can be found in the smallest wild moments, often just beyond our doorsteps.
Jane Gaffrey (West Fargo, North Dakota)
My work includes portraits of pets and people. It also includes expressions of my experience as a physician (child and adolescent psychiatrist) as well as experiences with depression and leukodystrophy for which I had a bone marrow transplant.
A piece I did for the MN Quilters challenge called “New Beginnings: physician to artist” was transformative in my healing. Art is play as I explore new materials. It is life-giving and life-sustaining.
My goals are to continue to express life experiences and the hope that shines even if only as a tiny speck of light in difficult circumstances. I would like to continue to learn in the area of art quilting and expand to other media. In addition I hope to be able to use my art to help parents grieving the loss of a child and children and families facing life-threatening illness.
I hope to be able to make both art quilts and traditional quilts from items of important clothing or other fabric items belonging to individuals that can be a piece of healing, memory, and hope.
Tabeena Wani (Athens, Ohio)
My current work examines geopolitical boundaries, with a particular focus on lines of control and lines of normalizing control through a conceptual tool, i.e., Summ.
In Kashmiri language, Summ refers to the visible parting line on the scalp between sections of the hair. It serves as a metaphor for natural as well as despotic lines such as rivers, ravines, mountains, walls, apartheid fences, sandbag bunkers, and barricades. These lines highlight the division and bisection of geographical, domestic and personal spaces.
One such line divides the region of Kashmir in three separate parts controlled by three distinct countries with nuclear capabilities. LOC, a de-facto military line between Indian and Pakistan administrated Kashmir, functions as an institution that shapes the socio-political dynamics of the Kashmir valley where I grew up.
I use techniques like knitting, embroidery and welding with traditional materials like Pashmine, Tille embroidery, Kashmiri tea, copper, steel and human hair. I fabricate sculptures that question the capacity of the line to have dual nature, obstructive as well as permeable.
Shaped by the daily presence of barricades and sandbag bunkers my work mimics forms that despite being obstructive are porous in nature and are traversed by indigenous people on daily basis.
Brianna Wiersema (Mitchell, South Dakota)
My work is an extension of the self I am just getting to know. My goals are to keep exploring my potential and growing my skill while navigating my disability. My work expresses my goals because it saves my life over and over when I need it most.
Each time I create a piece it’s an expression of my goal to live and continue when I almost did not. Each piece I share is a piece of me forever connected to a world I once wanted to leave. It grounds me in ways I didn’t know were possible and I’m grateful for it every day.
Rebecca Kautz (Sun Prairie, Wisconsin)
My allegorical work uses psychoanalysis and personal history to explore personal and political narratives surrounding identity, illness, belonging and place. My work is influenced by my rural Midwest upbringing where feelings of estrangement stem from childhood trauma and a dysfunctional family.
The repeating element of the Defiant Vermont Castings wood burning stove signals the maladjusted child-self. Installed by my father during the 1970’s energy crisis, the woodstove was the primary source of heat. It is a witness and a central figure in the family room of my childhood home. Ancient societal issues such as predators of the marginal, are depicted as alligators. A melancholic mood hides beneath high-key colors combined with personal imagery and cultural iconography.
These candy colors are ‘out of step’ and discordant when used to depict antique, early American décor common in my rural Victorian home. Nostalgia and neurosis are states that grip and obfuscate in equal measure.
My goal is to gain a broader audience, expanded exhibition opportunities, and a solo show of new work.
My goal is to shine a light on issues of surviving childhood trauma and personal recovery. I speak openly about my lived experience in my work in effort to dispel shame.
