Absolutely no disrespect intended to the disabled if I cut this post short.
"Wheelchair icon revamped by guerrilla art project" by Billy Baker | Globe Staff, December 14, 2013
It started as a guerrilla street art project in Cambridge aimed at beginning a conversation. Then it quickly became something else, a grass-roots movement that spread quickly, because it requires no language and no explaining. You just have to consider two very similar images.
One image is the wheelchair symbol, which has become one of the most familiar icons in the world since it was introduced in 1968. The other is an edited version, with the human distinct from the chair, in an active position, with a feeling of forward movement.
In the three years since Sara Hendren, a Cambridge artist and writer who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Brian Glenney, an assistant professor of philosophy at Gordon College, began placing their version over the existing one, the Accessible Icon Project has gone from an artistic statement to a global movement.
Today, the symbol has been adopted by institutions as varied as the Jacksonville Jaguars of the NFL, the city of New York, and the Boys and Girls Club in South Boston. Recently, the Museum of Modern Art accepted the image into its permanent collection.
“It’s amazing how many people have discovered this project and then rallied behind it,” Hendren said. “People write to us from all over the world, and they say ‘I know exactly what you’re doing. You don’t even need to explain it.’ ”
I must be missing the ride because the Globe and I are just not connecting these days.
The symbolic icon is that important an issue, huh?
The original goal of the project was to begin a dialogue about the way society views disability. They felt the old symbol was stiff, robotic, with the chair functioning as a part of, not a tool for, the human. The original icon was just a wheelchair until a later designer added a head in the form of a dot on the top of the chair back.
I never really thought anything like that. I see the symbol and I say to myself don't park there, it is reserved for people with disabilities.
Hendren and Glenney call each other co-instigators, but their goal was never to instigate a movement. Others had already tried that, but....
They didn't have a mouthpiece media put them on the front page?
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