How has your process changed since you started painting the Circle Story portraits? What do you want to change with your paintings? You describe criticism of your portrait series at a 2002 conference by disabled people of color for lacking non-white subjects--can you talk about how you've addressed that?

How does portraiture create more impact for the themes and messages of your artwork than other forms of art?

Given your own experiences in your early childhood/the surgeries you’ve gone through, have these events shaped your perspective on genetic screening/editing technology, like CRISPR? If so, how? Do issues like these ever come up in your activism?

I'd like to ask Riva about the relationships she has to the subjects of her portraits. Do you ever do portraits of people that you don't know very well, or is it mostly people who you're already close with? Do you become very close with them as you complete the portrait? I suppose I'd like to know how doing a portrait of someone allows you to gain perspective into their life.

Can you explain a little about why you were drawn to portraits and your art process?

Questions:

How did going to Condon impact your career as an artist, writer, and activist?

Do you think your art acts as a form of activism and representation for disability? When did you decide to become an artist? Was it challenging, at first, to represent disability in your art because of critics in society or just views of people in society in general?

The two things I wanted to focus on for my contribution to our class discussion are how Good Kings, Bad Kings portrays what life is like for the children in the ILLC and how the video, "In My Home" portrays what life is like for disabled people when they decide not to be institutionalized. In Good Kings, Bad Kings the reader gets a glimpse into what life is like for disabled people in institutions like the ILLC and how often those who are admitted there fall through the cracks. Earlier in the book we see how Mia was sexually assaulted and how it took much too long for them to figure it out and offer her support.

I'd like to talk about Mia's situtation and 'caretakers' in institutions for disabled people raping their charges.

I find the comparisons between ILLC and the juvenile detention facilities described at different points in the story to be really interesting, and I'd like to discuss that aspect of the text in class. While juvie and ILLC are obviously different, there are a surprising amount of similarities when the two are described, which I assume was very intentional. In both places, the people being housed have very little freedom. Even at ILLC, the kids are intentionally kept to some degree of immobility just because it makes things easier on the staff. Additionally, in both places, the brightest part of the lives of the people housed there are the interactions the kids have with one another, despite their unfortunate circumstances.