Lawrence Choy
Artworks
Untitled, 2019. Glazed ceramic. Courtesy of the artist and Creative Growth.
Audio description
About the Artist
Lawrence Choy’s choice of subject matter has changed throughout his career as an artist. For a time, he focused on animals, next came laptops and calculators, then submarines, then food. Regardless of the subject, Choy always employs an imaginative twist. Playing with scale and psychedelic colors, he turns the everyday into the fantastic. As an obsessive self-archivist, he devotedly sports a camera as if it were any other clothing staple and documents his life and the world around him.
Lawrence Choy was born in San Francisco in 1962 and has practiced as an artist at Creative Growth since 2013.
Creative Growth is a non-profit based in Oakland that advances the inclusion of artists with developmental disabilities in contemporary art by providing a professional studio environment and gallery representation. Sparked by the nationwide deinstitutionalization of disabled people, Florence and Elias Katz, an artist, and a psychologist, founded three Bay Area non-profit art studios―Creative Growth in 1974, NIAD in 1982 (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development), and Creativity Explored in 1983. These programs often collaborate and share resources, and serve as a model for the field of art and disability worldwide.