The Anderson Center at Tower View — The Enduring Art of Gentle Pointing Fingers: A Juried Deaf Art Exhibition
Overview
The Enduring Art of Gentle Pointing Fingers takes as its departure a precise cultural tension: the pointing hand, which in hearing contexts reads as impolite or confrontational, is in sign language a grammatical and pronominal foundation, capable of referring to a person without assigning gender. The exhibition observes that Deaf people, aware of how pointing is perceived by others, often soften or disguise the gesture—a small, daily negotiation that becomes the seed for a broader curatorial inquiry into the nature of Deaf Art itself. Rather than prescribing a single definition, the exhibition asks what makes a work of art Deaf Art, and points toward the many ways that category can be enacted. This is not a survey of identity as subject matter alone, but an examination of how linguistic, visual, and embodied knowledge shapes form. The Anderson Center at Tower View, an institution with a history of supporting artists across disciplines, provides a context where such questions can be posed without reductiveness. The call is open to all disciplines and carries no submission fee. Artists selected for the juried exhibition will have their work presented within a thematic frame that treats Deaf cultural production as a site of ongoing formal and conceptual invention. The curatorial vision is one of precision and restraint: the exhibition does not ask artists to explain Deafness, but to extend the conversation that the pointing hand begins.