How this US Down syndrome artist earned her master's in fine arts

Handlin's success highlights her talent, determination, and the importance of inclusivity in higher education. Photos: Instagram/Handlinrachel

When I met artist Rachel Handlin at White Columns, a non-profit gallery in the West Village, New York, the United States, she immediately outstretched her arms.

“I’m a hugger,” she said. “You’re so cute,” she added.

I thanked her and replied that she was cute, too.

“You’re cute,” she said. “I’m beautiful, actually.”

Handlin is possibly the first person with Down syndrome to receive a master’s degree in fine arts. Photo: NYTHandlin, 29, was almost finished installing her first solo show, Strangers Are Friends I Haven’t Met Yet. Like the blue line of cyanotype images tracing the rooms where her photos, sculptures and video works are displayed, the show “connects the community who didn’t know it”, she explained, adding, “It is a community through the image.”

That community is composed of roughly two dozen people with Down syndrome across the globe who have graduated from two- or four-year colleges – like Handlin herself, who holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts (CIA) in Valencia, California.

In May 2024, she graduated with a master’s degree in fine arts from Pratt Institute in New York; Handlin became the first person in the world with Down syndrome to receive a master’s degree, she and her family believe.

For five years, she and her mother, Laura Handlin, who is her aide and studio assistant, travelled to Peru, Australia and Spain to take her peers’ portraits. “I just met them all on Facebook,” Handlin said.

As she surveyed her work, Handlin recited the biographies of some of her subjects – like Spanish actor and disability activist Pablo Pineda and Missouri-based chocolatier Adam DeBacker – pausing occasionally to glance at the wall text.

“Before she photographs someone, she’s got to talk to them for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and get to know them – that’s how they establish a bond,” her mother said. “That connection with people is really important.”

Knack for art

Handlin grew up in Manhattan Beach, California, where she attended general education classes with an aide and was tutored after school by her mother, who left a job in commercial real estate when Handlin was born. Her parents noticed some early signs of an affinity for art.

In museums, “she would sign what she was seeing in the image”, said her father, Jay Handlin. On a family trip to Paris, Rachel Handlin seemed to have a strong response to the paintings in the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre and the Musée Picasso.

Earning a Master's in Fine Arts highlights Handlin's ability to overcome societal expectations and emphasises that individuals with Down syndrome can achieve academic excellence.A trip to New York, when Handlin was in middle school, was particularly formative. Her father remembered her capturing the storefronts on Orchard Street using a point-and-shoot camera to pass the time while he shopped.

“They weren’t like what you would expect an eighth grader to do,” Jay Handlin, a litigator, said of the images.

She enrolled in a digital photography class in high school. When, during senior year, her friends began looking at colleges, Handlin “just kind of assumed that everybody else was going and she was going to go”, her father said.

At CIA, she became immersed in the darkroom and discovered a love of large-format photography, which she calls a “meditative” process. She started to wonder about master’s in fine art (MFA) programmes. Her interest, though, raised questions about accessibility. To her family’s knowledge, only one other person with Down syndrome had pursued graduate studies in art: Ezra Roy, who had been accepted to New York’s Bard College’s MFA programmes but who died before completing it.

She was accepted at several schools, but she was drawn to Pratt Institute, partly because two of her cousins were students there. The family moved from California to Brooklyn to support Handlin during her programme.

“She was one of the people who had a very clear idea of what she was doing, what she wanted to do,” said Sara Rafferty, the former director of graduate studies in photography at Pratt Institute, who oversaw Handlin’s work.

Right away, she noticed that Handlin had a “singular and well-developed artistic voice”, she added.

In the programme, Handlin began making sculptures of her silhouette with the help of her mother, who sometimes lends a hand with heavy equipment. They caught the attention of Matthew Higgs, White Columns’ director and chief curator, who visited her studio last year after hearing about Handlin from one of her professors.

“This idea of the outline being an image of invisibility and marginalisation – the whole thing seemed to be very compelling, but also something that I hadn’t seen before in art,” he said.

Handlin’s photography project featuring people with Down syndrome interested him, too. It had elements of documentary, he said, but “because of Rachel coming from within that community and that narrative, it was something else. It was about making connections”.

He told her he wanted to show the pieces at White Columns, which is known for giving little-known artists their first break. It wasn’t a question that Handlin’s work would be at home in his gallery.

In the wider art world, though, “there’s still this kind of resistance to work produced by individuals with disabilities”, he said, which is sometimes categorised as “outsider art” – a term for the work of self-taught or untrained artists operating without the support of fine arts programmes and mainstream galleries.

Making connections

With an MFA in hand, Handlin could hardly be called an outsider. But through her artistic gaze, she has brought notice to a group of people who are often pushed to the margins of an elite industry.

“I’ve never seen any depictions of people with Down syndrome from within the community,” Rafferty said. “There is a special access to vision, visuality, point of view, lived experience, that comes with that.”

Handlin, too, appears in the show: Three of her five welded works are life-size silhouettes. One depicts Handlin taking a photograph with a field view camera, while another shows her exercising.

Handlin with one of her life-size steel silhouettes at White Columns, a gallery in New York. Photo: NYTHandlin pointed out a smaller welded sculpture titled Invisible, showing an abstract silhouette of herself wearing a “crazy Andy Warhol wig” and standing next to her mother.

“People ask my mother what my name is and how old I am,” she said. “It makes me feel invisible.”

The next night, Handlin worked the room at the opening reception. Dressed in a lace mock-neck blouse and a silver skirt, she flitted from one group to the next, posing for photographs.

People from various parts of her life showed up – distant cousins from New England, someone from Handlin’s childhood therapy center in California, classmates from Pratt Institute – but also art-world figures like Vince Aletti, The New Yorker photography critic, and Bridget Finn, the director of Art Basel in Miami Beach, Florida.

“Rachel has an ability to soften people’s defenses, and you can see it in the images – the way she captures intimacy and confidence that aren’t performed for the camera, but occur alongside and with the camera, and with her,” said Jody Graf, an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art PS1 in New York.

As guests started to say goodbye, her parents found themselves at a loss for words. “I don’t think any parent ever anticipates something like this, but we sure didn’t,” her father said.

He added, “It’s a lot of moving mountains, or plowing through the mountains when they won’t move,” referring to supporting her creative ambitions.

“It’s a lot of work,” Handlin said, reflecting on how the show had come together.

“A lot of hours working in the dark room and metal shop, wood shop – it makes me feel tired!” – ©2024 The New York Times