Art and Autism

Sonia Boué, Art Monthly 498, July-August, 2026

‘If you’ve met one person with autism,’ said Dr Stephen Shore, ‘you’ve met one person with autism.’ This saying is true, although I prefer to say that I am an autistic person rather than a person with autism: a dialectic at the heart of the autistic identity politics which formed me in the early to mid 2010s. I know to speak only for myself. Views differ. Routes to diagnosis and self-discovery also vary; flying under the radar until your 50s is not the same as having been a ‘SEND kid’ (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) at school. We are diverse, counter to stereotypes.

The stories we tell ourselves create our identities. Mine began in 1997, as the mother of a beautiful autistic child. It is also the same year that Agnes Martin made the six-panel series, ‘With My Back to the World’, in New Mexico. Martin (Interview AM169) had famously left the New York art scene in 1967 and made work in ways I call ‘radically introverted practices’ or RIPS: a concept I developed for a commission for John Hansard Gallery in 2024. When I need to, I live like a hermit; autism isn’t a pose – ‘Hell is other people’, as Jean Paul Sartre famously said. Today, we can identify as neuroqueer. I wonder whether Martin, who also never publicly disclosed being gay in her lifetime, would have if she were still alive today. The year 1967 was also the year when psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor Bruno Bettelheim published The Empty Fortress, Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self, which helped popularise the appalling ‘refrigerator mother’ theory, which encouraged the idea that autistic children should be separated from their families to help cure them.