When I started making The Latest, I knew exactly who I hoped would understand it.
Other late-diagnosed autistic women.
I began the series while processing my own late autistic diagnosis and everything that came with looking backward at four decades of my life through completely new information. I was making work about acceptance, masking, communication, overwhelm, hyperfocus, empathy, social expectations, internalized and external ableism, and the strange combination of grief and freedom that can come from finally understanding yourself.
I knew those experiences would be familiar to other late-diagnosed autistic women.
What I didn't know was whether anyone else would care.
Putting It Out There Anyway
Earlier this year, after spending a few years very ill with chronic health issues and recovering from burnout, I made a decision about The Latest: finished or not I was going to start putting it into the world. Ready or not, here The Latest comes.
I was going to enter it anywhere and everywhere that felt aligned.
One of the first places I shared work from the series was Disabled Women Make History (and Art), organized by EmpowerHer Network and the Toledo Museum of Art. It was a historic year for the annual exhibition, that featured the work of exclusively disabled women artists, because for the first time they had funding to exhibit the work for more than a short pop-up show. That meant that Not Even If You Wanted To was exhibited there during the entirety of Disability Pride Month.
Going to Toledo for the opening changed something for me.
I met women whose experiences intersected with mine in ways I hadn't anticipated. One artist had also returned to her practice after illness and burnout and also had a gap in her artist résumé because of it. While I certainly wouldn't wish those experiences on anyone else, meeting someone who understood them was invaluable. I also met other people that experienced my work in different ways to me. Talking with others about their perspectives and hearing how they connected to the work reminded me why I wanted to keep sharing the work. Art is such a powerful tool of communication for me, because it can say what I sometimes cannot say and in turn it allows other people to connect with and communicate through it as well. So I kept entering new shows.
Apparently, It’s All Too Much
Now two works from The Latest: Not Even If You Wanted To and Guess Who, have been selected for It’s All Too Much, curated by Emily Cate Sabree for Excess Contemporary.
The exhibition considers artists' interpretations of the challenges of contemporary life, with curation leaning toward maximalist and realist work.
It’s All Too Much
October 1 through November 22, 2026.
Its as if the stars aligned and The Latest found itself in a show called It’s All Too Much. Too much is v familiar territory. Too sensitive. Too literal. Too intense. Too excited. Too particular. Too emotional. Too colorful. Too interested. Too much information. Too many ideas. Doing too much.
And sometimes, somehow simultaneously: not enough. Not expressive enough. Not social enough. Not flexible enough. Not interested enough. Not reacting enough. Not doing enough.
One of the things I have been exploring through The Latest is what happens when I stop trying to resolve those contradictions for other people and for myself.
What if I just make the work?
The Latest: Not Even If You Wanted To, 2026
I Said What I Said
The Latest is not subtle about being feminine.
It is not subtle about color.
It is not particularly interested in looking effortless.
There are toys, games, tiny objects, bright colors, burning words, carefully arranged grids and visual jokes sitting alongside experiences that aren’t funny at all. That combination is intentional, because I don't think difficult subjects require visually difficult art.
I love playful art. Play gives us another way into ideas that might otherwise feel intimidating, inaccessible, or overwhelmingly serious. Color can attract someone before they know what they're looking at. Humor can create enough space to approach something painful. And once someone has entered through that door, the work can do something else.
But Will Anyone Else Get It?
That question has been hanging around the project from the beginning. Not whether everyone would understand every reference. I wondered whether someone who isn't autistic could look at work this specifically rooted in autistic experience and still find a place to enter it.
More and more, the answer I'm getting back is that specificity and connection aren't opposites. What I learned in Toledo showed me that people can connect to the work regardless of whether or not they share my experience. And even once they hear mine, it doesn’t take away from their interpretation, it adds to it. The art expands to hold multiple experiences.
Someone doesn't have to recognize the exact experience behind Guess Who or Not Even If You Wanted To to know what it feels like to be evaluated by someone else's expectations or unable to connect or communicate in a way that they need to be understood.
They don't have to have spent decades masking autism to recognize the exhaustion of performing an acceptable version of themselves. Our experiences don't have to be the same for us to meet somewhere inside the work.
Specificity Is the Door
I used to wonder whether making The Latest deeply and unapologetically autistic might limit where it could go. I think I had the question backward. Maybe the specificity is the door. Just like I don’t need to make myself more palatable, I don't need to sand off the autistic edges to make the work more universal. I don't need to make it less colorful, less playful, less feminine, less personal, or less earnest so that someone else can find themselves inside it.
I can tell the truth from where I'm standing. Someone else can stand somewhere entirely different and still recognize something through the window. That is one of the things I've always loved about art. And right now, as The Latest begins finding its way into spaces I wasn't certain would have room for it and what I’m learning is: The Latest gets to show up as itself and so do the rest of us.
And that includes you too.