Riva Lehrer is a portrait artist whose work focuses on representations of the disabled body and the experience of disability. She was also a visiting artist at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Gross Anatomy Lab for four years. In this program, Lehrer will be joined by Norman Lieska, associate professor of anatomy at UIC, to consider variation in the body and its relation to beauty. Blurring the boundaries between the scientific and the expressive, and using a combination of art imagery and anatomical references, Lehrer and Lieska consider how variation may lead to creativity: the more variant a person’s body is, the more a person has to rethink the environment and options for getting from here to there. They will take a look at variation inside the body, consider abnormalities not visible on the body’s surface, and note the slippery play between so-called normal and variation.